Every activity, every event and every movement is a transition from one state to another, starting with the state of innocence moving into the state of realized innocence, from there to ignorance and further to intelligence and all this cycle ends at the state of Wisdom or ultimate realization.

Philosophy is all about transition to a state of wisdom, where every particle converges into a single entity.

Keeping aside the technologies involved/models/frameworks involved, testing as such is an attitude that undergoes transition from one state to another, in a non-realistic sense this cycle never ends, but again we are in business and we need some deadlines etc thus the cycle is forcibly compressed.

Typically we start as innocent engineers playing with products just like kids, as we gain knowledge of the product we start interpreting the product and how its supposed to behave (the SPECS add to this activity), at this state we tend to become a bit ignorant and narrowed and obviously the testing resulting from a narrow and limited knowledge is always narrow, from this limited /ignorant state we become more and more knowledgeable and testing gets more and more refined.

Finally when we reach the wisdom state, it doesn’t really matter what testing we are doing or what technology we are using what matters most is howz our wise thinking helping us in making the product better. At this state we are not worried about finding more bugs; we are worried about making things better.

This state leads to lot of questions related to why and what, forcing us to think about some frameworks or models which can be applied to future product testing.
But unfortunately technology, knowledge, perceptions etc are vast and one can not compress all these into one framework and eventually we end-up creating tons of models and frame works (these are definitely useful in short run, but when we look at the ultimate goal of testing, iam really skeptical about them)
Hence every new product testing is a new philosophical journey it starts but never ends (though it might really end in a commercial and project management sense)

I Co-relate this to the day to day guidance we get from our intelligent mentors and wise mentors. Intelligent mentors typically guide us In our career academics etc and wise mentors are more worried about our personality as a whole.

It might sound too philosophical, but I found this how things go(at this point i also confess that what i might have experienced could be Minuscule), we transit from one state to another in search of making things better and better. The Key always lies in changing your attitude from time to time and synching up our testing to the phase.

[James’ Reply: This is interesting. Thank you.] 

I wonder if I’m alone in finding the way in which you interrupt the flow of a comment with your responses is overly disruptive?

My first experience of computer mediated communication was with Usenet, where the practice of responding to a post was to selectively quote the original message and respond to points as they were made, so I’m used to reading text like that. But in a Usenet system, it was usually possible to go back and look at the entire original message that was being commented on. Or, more usually, it meant that you had read the whole thing and possibly digested it before coming to the point by point rebuttal.

When reading the comments on your blog, I find myself wishing that you’d allow the original, unedited comment to stand by itself before posting your response. If, in your replies, you were to reverse your current italic/roman style I’m sure it’d make for a much easier better reading experience. Italic text is harder to read on a screen than roman text (sorry, I don’t have a citation for that, just personal experience). By posting the unaltered comment first and then your reply, both comment and response can have the scrutiny they deserve.

As I’m sure you realise, I’m not just saying this because of your responses the one time I commented here but because, in following other comment threads I’ve found the reading experience to be a little uncomfortable. The constant interruptions remind me of a Jeremy Paxman or John Humphreys political interview. Or maybe Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

[James’ Reply: I hear you, and I appreciate your politely worded sentiment. I struggle with this, because this format bothers me, too. However, I also find the obvious alternatives problematic.

At one point, I was thinking that it would be wrong to interpolate my replies, because it’s impolite to interrupt people. But then I remembered that this is my own forum– much like a radio call-in show. While I will not change or remove words of a comment, because that would be a material distortion of someone’s ideas, I do get to talk back when and how I like. I freely admit that I use comments as a way to further my own messages and purposes.

Be that as it may, I will continue to think about this. If you or anyone else would like to suggest (or show me) a specific protocol that you like better, then email me an example of what it would look like, and I’ll consider doing it your way.] 

[James’ Reply: Since people are commenting on posts in this category, I thought it made sense to post it in this category.]