A couple of weeks ago on my podcast, I was talking to James Bach and we were discussing the language of testing and what I refer to as “word policing”. Well, I think I might have caused some confusion based on the feedback and comments I’ve been getting, so I wanted to state my view.

To be clear, I think imprecision in the language we use to talk about testing is a BIG problem in our industry, and I am completely aligned on this with James (and the CDT/RST community). Where we might have a potential difference in opinion is WHEN to tackle this problem with clients.

If you listen to what I said in the interview (and what I’ve been saying my entire career), it’s that I have not had good experiences with helping people do better testing by STARTING with how they talk about testing. I have found that the culture in some parts of the testing world, the influence of large commodity based testing vendors, and the rot caused by certification rent seekers makes that a very toxic place to begin working with people.

I am also a strong believer in meeting people where they are and having the semantic discussions to understand what people mean by they words they use – not attacking them for not knowing terms of art in a business that’s constantly evolving.

In my opinion, the culture wars in the testing world went into overdrive during the “Testing and Checking” public discussion and has had a knock on effect we’re still feeling today. In reality, (and if you actually read what was written) that debate did a great service to our industry, and personally gave me a new entry for speaking with non-testing folks about automation in testing and tools and how that relates to business risk.

Which brings me to my point about all of this, IME/O it is much more important (as the good Dr Feynman would say) to know “the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Precision in language and understanding what people mean by the words they use are both equally important when I work with clients, but knowing how to steer those conversations and the value of changing behaviour takes discernment – not brute force.

As my friend Michael Bolton often says, “good luck with your thing”!