Context Driven

I posted this to the Software-Testing Yahoo Group yesterday, and I thought Creative Chaos Readers might enjoy this. The background is a post saying that context-driven thinking was universal, and there was no value in putting people into different boxes such as the "Analytic" (Academic, Telecom, Finite State Machines) school of testing or the "Factory" School (ISTQB).

In reply Scott Barber wrote:
*If* that is the case (and I'm not saying I agree, I'm just doing a thought experiment), then who is it promoting things like "Best Practices" and flaming things like Exploratory Testing? Is it managers? Developers? Tech Magazine columnists? Because *someone* is promoting these ideas and it isn't anyone who believes in the context sensitivity of testing.

And I replied:
In my experience, when people are fighting XP and promoting best practices, they are often willing to pay lip service to the concept that software environments are different, and what works for you might not work for me, and vice versa.

Then they go back to the chalk board and continue explaining the rational, unified model thingy that applies to everyone. :-)

Seriously, it's hard to argue with context-driven principles, and few people do. It is a lot easier to ignore them - and many do. (I think that's allready been said on this list, so I labelled this post ...)