Survivorship, Best Practices and The Power of Wish Thinking

“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.”Richard Feynman

I recently had the distinct privilege of watching an expert tester at work. I wouldn’t call this person a “test manager” or “test lead”, even though what they were doing would probably be categorized as an activity associated with both of those roles. No, I would give them the honor of calling them an expert tester – someone using all of their knowledge and skills developed through years of practicing their craft. And they weren’t even testing software; they were testing ideas. Testing assumptions. Testing people. Testing themselves. It was a thing of beauty. Continue reading

ISTQB Petition Comments

The following are some of the comments I’ve received from the signers of the ISTQB Foundations Exam Review petition. They are obviously biased, but interesting themes are developing. Chris Carter (another training provider) has just been elected president of the ISTQB, so please take a moment to send him an email (chris.carter@istqb.org) to let him know you’d like some answers. Enjoy! Continue reading

Strange Bedfellows

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. – Noam Chomsky

Earlier this year, I wrote about the “bizarre public spectacle made up of innuendo, accusations and irony” that the context driven testing website seems to have spiraled into lately. So when I saw the latest missive launched at my questions for the ISTQB, it wasn’t surprising that it was filled with the usual snark (Rabid Software Testing) and name calling (twits). If you can get past the juvenile antics, there are a couple of points that although, mostly irrelevant to the discussion, call for a response.

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Certifiable – Fighting the fights worth fighting…

“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”Thomas Paine

If you have followed me lately on Twitter, you may have noticed a slight, well let’s say, fervor pursing answers to the questions I posed to the ISTQB. Since publishing that letter a little over a week ago, an important conversation in the software testing community has been reignited over Twitter, LinkedIn, multiple blogs, and loaded up my inbox. And that conversation is NOT about testing certifications or the rackets employed to “regulate”, train, and issue them. Let me be clear, the certification debate is very important, but it is a symptom of a disease in our business: the disease of not owning our value proposition. Continue reading