Schedule and Events



March 26-29, 2012, Software Test Professionals Conference, New Orleans
July, 14-15, 2012 - Test Coach Camp, San Jose, California
July, 16-18, 2012 - Conference for the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2012), San Jose, California
August 2012+ - At Liberty; available. Contact me by email: Matt.Heusser@gmail.com

Thursday, August 27, 2009

The testing renaissance

I just posted this in the Software-Testing Yahoo Group; I thought it also applies to Creative Chaos:


--- In agile-testing@yahoogroups.com, "woynam" wrote:
>
>
> It never ceases to amaze me the tremendous contribution
>that Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk community, has provided
>to our field, especially considering the small penetration
>that the language achieved.
>

Indeed. This reminds me of an old Paul Graham essay where he pointed out that the renaissance basically started in Florence, Italy.

What was it about Florence, that it generated more than it's fair share of genius's per capital? Was it something in the water? Probably not, because Florence in 1,000 AD and Florence in 1,900 AD did not have that level of success.

What was it then?

Something about the culture of collaboration and sponsorship, I think. The Florentine middle-class who were allowed to make big piles of money and keep it in the 1,200's (from silk, IIRC), went on to become upper-class a few hundred years later and sponsor artists, and, eventually, the knowledge workers, the Da Vinci's, had the opportunity to pursue a life of innovation and creation.

If you want a similar story, look into Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), that invented the Ethernet, the Windowed Operating System, Personal Computing, and Object Oriented Programming - ideas picked up by Apple and the SmallTalk folks.

We may be reaching a similar place in software development and testing. Better yet, it can be led by practitioners who also do. My greatest concern, at this point, is this idea of Dogma and Belief, EG Agile-Testing is or is not this specific thing - without any feedback or evaluation of if that thing works for what environments and how it could be done better.

We may be getting past that. And I think that is a good day, indeed.

Regards,

--matt heusser

1 comment:

Anne-Marie said...

They also had a tendency in Florence to poison you if you didn't do what they said! Hopefully we have evolved a bit since then?

At my first job interview (before I had even left university) I was asked what I thought of Quality.

I answered, that Quality was an attitude, which left the poor HR person a bit stumped.

However, I have never forgotten that, and I think its a good approach to testing