My son turned 16 a couple of weeks ago, and the event prompted me to take a fresh look at him. This is hard to do, in life. You put someone in a category, and it’s all too easy to keep him there. I think my own mother still thinks I’m 14 years-old (the age at which I moved away from home). She reacted to me then just as she reacts to me now, not quite believing that I’m an adult (I’m afraid I don’t get along much with my mother.) But with my father, I’ve become good friends. He saw the mistakes I made and phases I went through, years ago, but recognized that I grew through them.

So, my son is becoming a man. There’s more depth to him, this year. He’s a little more reliable. He seems to have plans for the future. His confidence is improving. I must take this fellow more seriously.

And now for the segue: The same is true about Indian software testing culture. It’s still, on the whole, pretty unremarkable, but there’s a wonderful bright creativity bursting out. It demands our attention. Events are happening quickly, now.

Today I’ve added another Indian tester’s blog to my blogroll. Dhanasekar S’s blog is part of a bona fide trend: sapient testing blogs. These are blogs by people who write exploratory essays (note that the term “exploratory essay” predates exploratory testing, but means something quite similar) that analyze the progress of their thinking as they test. They try to open the black boxes of their minds for us to see inside. They don’t just recycle folklore about tools or processes or rules or definitions, as most Indian testing blogs have traditionally done.

Dhanasekar’s entries include “I can’t Nike because I Rebok” which whimsically declares sapience, and “Unbelievable, Up to 80% off*” which skewers claims made by automation sales people.

This is something very fresh in Indian testing culture. I believe it’s a dam that is in the process of bursting. I don’t know how many testers there are are in India. It’s got to be at least 100,000. If just one of two hundred of them can write and have ambition, they will make a tremendous impact on the direction and development of the testing craft.

I believe Pradeep Soundararajan’s blog was the first of these self-aware testing blogs. The next one I knew about was Sajjadul Hakim’s blog (yeah, I know, he’s in Bangladesh, but look at a map. It’s right nearby). For a long time, those were the only two. In recent months, perhaps spurred by the Weekend Testers, more have cropped up. A canonical example is Parimala Shankaraiah and her account of the 30-minute challenge. What a spirit of inquiry! Santosh Shukla blogged about a challenge I gave him and how he reacted to it. I came across Sharath Byregowda, while googling for more. He’s at Mindtree, where I taught a class, some years ago, hoping to plant seeds. Nandagopal has just started a blog, I hope he sticks with it. He’s an example of a relative fresher using blogging to help focus his thoughts.

[I should have included Shrini's Thinking Tester blog, here. Sorry Shrini!]

There are sapient testing bloggers around the world. I’m singling out India because there are so many testers there and this has been so out of character for them up to now.

The sapient bloggers are re-examining patterns that have surrounded testers since the beginning, but that most of us take for granted. This is also a secret to my success. Unlike most people, I don’t think it’s a waste of time to ask myself questions like “How do I know how to open a door in a building I’ve never before been to?” or “How do I decide that a pattern on my screen represents a button and not background art?” To many people around me, it is enough to trust in the magic of human inductive reasoning. They are satisfied that a little elf inside their heads just knows how to see things and recognize them and test. But I am not satisfied with that. I don’t consider thoughtlessness to be pragmatic. Neither do the members of this new Indian wave.

First there was Pradeep. Now there’s maybe a dozen others. I predict, by two year from now, there will be a hundred of them, and someone in India will have organized the first Sapient Testers Conference. I hope I am able to attend.

P.S. I spoke to Aparna Sharma, who runs the testing division at Infosys (the division is called IVS, but I think that’s a fancy was of saying testing). I expect to be blogging soon about what she told me about how they develop testing expertise at Infosys. Her answers were impressive, but I’d like to hear from actual Infosys testers in order to get a sense of the ground truth.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 3:43 am and is filed under Software Testing and Quality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.