I just returned from teaching in Bangalore, India. I taught at Mindtree and Wipro, two well-known outsourcing companies. Before I taught there, I had believed that exploratory testing techniques would not go over well in Asia, because the Indian technical culture is too “process oriented.”

I was wrong. To the country and testers of India, I apologize.

My rapid testing methodology is a process of relentlessly questioning what needs to be done and how. My teaching style involves a lot of exercises, magic tricks, socratic debriefings, and encouraging students to doubt everything from the claims I make to my very competence as a tester. My favorite kind of student is sharp and irreverent, because a fine tester mind is one that sees past the illusions that tend to cloud the imaginations of others.

I have met quite a few such sharp testers in the U.S. and UK. But, in India I expected to find polite, silent students. I expected that they would be intelligent, but timid about engaging mind-to-mind with me in class, especially when what I’m teaching flies in the face of most traditional advice about testing that they have read and heard.

What I found instead were testers who quickly warmed to the challenges I made. They did speak up. They didn’t challenge me with the same intellectual swagger typical of testers in, say, England, but they responded to my questions and found novel answers to problems I posed them. In several of the exercises, solutions were proposed that I had not heard from anyone else since I started teach in 1995.

Like most testers, they have not yet developed their potential. But I no longer believe there are important cultural obstacles to hold them back. So, don’t be surprised if in a few years the Indians start getting the reputation as insightful, penetrating testers.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2003 at 2:33 pm 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.