EVOLUTIONAL TESTING

It’s time to move on….

Lies, crap, and software testing. I’m Totally Over the drama queen paranoia and finger-pointing. Then again, it’s been a while since we’ve wallowed in this kind of engineered soap opera, so I guess it was overdue.

The blogs lately have been heinous. I think a few people got their nose hairs tweaked because everyone isn’t totally excited about “checks”. To top it off, someone wrote a pretty good book that used the word “exploratory” and wasn’t blessed by The King. No, not Elvis Presley. Elvis has checked out of the test lab.

Truly, these have got to be the least exciting excuses for a turf war I’ve ever seen.

I’m not sure I recognize that there is only one “exploratory testing group”. The testing field is not a monarchy. There is no Supreme Ruler who gets to decide who is “in” and who is “out”. There is no Heidi Klum of testing (sorry, guys).

Does the exploratory testing approach “belong” to anyone? Before it was exploratory testing it was called ad hoc testing. It existed before it was renamed.

My own thought is that no one owns this field, or even a piece of it. How can anyone believe the only worthwhile ideas in the past 20 years belong to one person or those they have blessed? Software testing isn’t a papacy either, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not kissing any rings. No one has the right to say person X, Y, or Z doesn’t have a clue because what they say is not what one person has either said or endorsed.

As far as the checks go, no one is “required” to care about the work or discussions going on in any one particular group and everyone is free to either support or not support whatever they choose. They have the right to say “that is not applicable to me” or “we don’t do things that way”. At the same time, no discussions need to be “shut down” because someone else isn’t interested in them. Have some balls. If it interests you, say so. Get involved. Go for it. If it doesn’t, you have a right to say so and move on.

In my case, I’ve been doing this a long time. Sometimes I forget everyone else hasn’t been doing this for as long as I have. That will be true of others as well. Sometimes people will be uninterested in an idea or concept because they’re way ahead of where you are, conceptually speaking. That doesn’t mean you aren’t going to surpass them. It means you have to catch up first. THEN you can pass them by, waving cheerfully. And the tables will turn and they’ll be behind you. Learning everything they can from you.

I’ve also observed that it doesn’t really matter whether a given idea has merit or not; some people fall in love with their own ideas and won’t give them up no matter what. They can pursue red herrings for years. So what? It’s their dime. Use their ideas or not; only YOU can decide what makes sense for you and your environment. There are also people who, I might add, are distributed equally between “exploratory” and “other” groups, that are so locked into the way THEY do things that they are completely incapable of trying anything another way or recognizing anything of value outside their own little world. Again, so what? Those kind of people exist in EVERY industry. Shrug your shoulders and move on. Be thankful you aren’t similarly handicapped.

I see people I respect bemoaning the lack of progress in the last 20 years, while they inadvertently feed their own perceived stasis. How can the field “progress” if only a small group of people are “allowed” to move it forward? The reality is that everyone has and is moving forward. Some can just recognize those changes more readily than others.

And why the sudden concentration on the 70s if you want to be insulting? In the 70s, testing in my neck of the woods consisted of development staff desk-checking code. The changes some people are trying hard to disparage occurred on a more wide-spread basis in the 80s. Regardless, what difference does it make when something started? Wasn’t the term “exploratory testing” coined 20 years ago? Was that crap too? And wasn’t the highly-respected person who coined it also an “academic”? Ah. Some academics are OK and some are not, is that it? Isn’t that a bit, well, hypocritical?

This is the kind of stuff I’m reading. And it leaves me totally cold. It’s a particularly revolting display of the problems with our field in general.

Can’t we leave that kind of crap behind? I think it’s time to open things up. Including our minds.

Evolution is an interesting thing. You can start it, you can contribute to it, but you can’t always predict how things will turn out. Things can evolve around you, and surpass you. You can’t always direct evolution. Sometimes it explodes and divides in unexpected ways.

It’s time to move on.

I want the freedom, and I CLAIM the freedom, to incorporate whatever I ideas I choose into my work. I don’t need anyone’s “permission” to call it whatever I choose. I don’t really care if your idea of exploratory testing doesn’t match that person’s over there. So what? Maybe you both have ideas that would useful for others. Maybe they’re both flavors of exploratory testing. MAYBE THE FIELD IS EVOLVING.

I am going to continue to use those ideas I find useful and discard those I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me if they’re approaches, methodologies, or techniques. What I’ve found, for myself, is that I’m most interested in techniques. An approach doesn’t mean much if you have no way to implement or support it. But you have to have some concept of approach first and there are others more interested in defining high-level approach. They’re the “idea men”. It’s up to everyone else to figure out how to make it work. And that’s OK. Regardless, when I’m interested in an idea, I don’t care if they’re blessed or pagan. I am going to do whatever makes sense in the environment I work in. Those of you totally locked in to your own little world, be it structured or exploratory, are going to be eating the dust of people like me. Is that what you want? Some of us don’t recognize any boundaries. We’re free to appreciate and use it all, or ditch whatever doesn’t make sense. We can think our own thoughts without asking permission, discuss and work on whatever we choose, and call whatever we’re doing whatever we want to call it.

I believe I’m going to call my own approach “Evolutional Testing”. That way I won’t step on any hyper-sensitive toes. And by the way, feel free to use that term without building me a shrine or bowing to the east whenever you use it. It means I will use whatever approaches, methodologies, and techniques make sense for what I’m doing and I’ll evolve as necessary to do the work more successfully, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Right now, I use ideas that are 25 years old. I use ideas that are 6 months old. And everything in-between. I’ve been helped or influenced by more people than I could say. I’ve developed my own techniques for a variety of issues I face every day. Altogether, I can see how I’ve evolved during the course of my career – as a tester, a person, and a manager. If all were right with the world, that would be what “contextual” testing meant. But I don’t meet many contextual testers that are actually contextual. Do you?

There isn’t anyone in this field I consider a “rival”. I’ll be perfectly happy for you if you succeed and you’re welcome to be or become Much Bigger than I am. I’m free to appreciate what every one of you brings to the table. I am happy with what I’ve accomplished personally and know I have contributed value to this field, whether it’s on a big scale or a little scale. What’s more, I feel YOU provide value to this field.

So take that knowledge and confidence in yourself and do something great with it. Why not absorb it all? Take it all in, play around with it, stick holes in it, add stuff to it, and mold it into what you need it to be. Share your thoughts, good and bad, with the field. Make yourself better. Make the field better. But I sincerely hope you do not allow anyone to limit you in what you choose to do. No one and everyone in this field “owns” testing, exploratory or other. Grab it and run with it. EVOLVE.

And the on-going soap opera? Well, let’s sit down in a comfy chair, get ourselves an adult beverage, and throw peanuts at our PC screens...

THAT’S THE WAY (UH-HUH, UH-HUH) I LIKE IT

Oh, hi, everyone. Excuse me whilst I remove my platform shoes.

More stuff on the differences between manual testing and checking? Argh. I wrote an entire blog (which was brilliant by the way – sorry you won’t be able to read it) on the topic, but decided not to post it as I wrote it. Damn Michael Bolton and James Bach anyway. If you haven't read their blog entries on this topic, you'll need to do that first, or this won't make much sense.

After reading their blogs, I sat around and thought about it for a while and decided my response was knee-jerk.

I understand the concept. It’s not hard to understand. I believe it likely James Whittaker and everyone else understands it too. One of the most offensive (and repetitive) statements made by James Bach infer that people who disagree with him don't understand him. In other words "anyone who disagrees with me is stupid".

Well, I understand, all right. I’m just not sure I care. Maybe that's how Mr. Bach's "rivals" feel too.

But I’ll make a concession.

There IS a difference, when contemplating manual testing, between what one might call “sapient” tests, which are being done for the first time and require concentration, analysis, and intelligence, and “rote” tests that have been repeated multiple times and where you are verifying a system reaction has been unaffected by changes or new code. The latter takes less attention than the former. The latter can be very boring. We try to automate the latter. We give the latter to people new to the function. We cut the latter where we can. So I concede that I have different strategies for handling these two categories as they have defined them. Same thing with automated testing.

But here’s the thing. I already have terms for those differences and I already have different strategies for handling them. But if this is the first time some people have ever recognized those differences, well, what can I say? This is old stuff to me, with new terminology. If it helps some bright people come up with new and better ways to handle “checks”, new techniques that cut time, resources, or costs without throwing away the knowledge and NECESSARY checks those “rote” tests provide, I will concede it was a Good Thing.

I do want to say however, that I’ve noticed that when the pickings get slim, someone who hasn’t thought of anything new for a while picks up something old and tries to MAKE it new. I can’t help wondering if it was either “checks” or comparing testing to raising ferrets.

I have to say that my mind isn’t blown. In fact, I’m kind of bored with this particular topic as it stands right now. And just as an inconsequential aside, I don’t think an on-line account to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) is particularly “sweet” either. I think “free” is sweet.

Other (no doubt lesser) dictionaries define “manual” as involving and using human effort, skill, power, energy, etc. Or “done by hand as opposed to machine”. Overall, manual testing does not evoke the concept of unskilled physical labor. I encourage you guys to come on down from that ivory tower and join the hoi polloi. Those kinds of statements make me think you’re out of touch.

I’d also like to make the point that intelligence and sapience are two different things. You can be the brightest bulb in the pack and still continue to plug into the wrong sockets. Sapience requires some common sense.

So anyway, I’m “bracing myself for insight”. Maybe some will be forthcoming soon. At least some solutions to the issues of minimizing time/money/resources spent on “checks” would provide some benefit to the field.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get my disco ball going...

Rock on.