Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D.

Last year, Rex and I had a debate at STPCon on the legitimacy and value of the concept of “schools of software testing.” We recently obtained a recording of the debates and merged it with slides to create a video. You can find additional slides and notes here: Kaner’s STPCon Debate Slides.

Rex Black expressed a few gripes about the concept of “schools” and about the way this concept has been applied in our field.

Schools or Strategies?

Rex’s first point — I think the central point of his presentation — is to acknowledge that there are different approaches to software testing but to argue that we should think of these as differences in strategy rather than divisions into schools. In his view (as I understand it), different people have different preferred strategies for dealing with testing situations. Some people can shift among strategies, choosing the best one for a given situation. As Rex sees it, looking at our field as a collection of schools is divisive and counterproductive.

I think his idea of conflicting (or alternative) strategies is appealing — plausible, but incomplete in a fundamental way.

The problem is that it ignores the social dynamics of the field, which is exactly what we are trying to capture with the idea of “schools.”

People tend to cluster. They find other people whose views or whose personal styles are compatible with theirs. They learn more from people in their cluster, they pay more attention to them, listen more closely to their advice and criticisms. Sometimes people cluster around an intellectually coherent point of view and organize their thinking about their work in terms of that view. At that point, we have the beginnings of a school. It is not just a strategy; it is an approach that is supported by a strong peer group.

This basic kind of clustering is so common that we barely notice it. Sometimes it becomes more pronounced and several of the clusters become more broadly influential.

Fields tend to swing between extremes of high (apparent) cohesiveness to high fragmentation. The evolution takes time.

• At the high-apparent-cohesiveness extreme, everyone agrees (or pretends to agree) with a dominant view. There is not much controversy. Progress is incremental and not very creative.
• At the high-fragmentation extreme, people have stopped listening to each other. They squander their creativity on better ways to promote an approach that they see as The One True Way, and to insult or shout down anyone who disagrees with it. There isn’t much progress at this extreme either. People are too busy scoring points about the basics of the field (or the basics of their controversy).

Several authors identify these extremes and describe them as unproductive. Neither extreme promotes an attitude of paying constructive attention to other views and gaining insights from them or taking risks to develop a new approach. (See my slides and notes for references.)

Between the extremes, you have creative tension and a lot of research (or skill development) that tries to get to the factual questions: what works, what happens, what costs, what benefits, what else can be done?

The idea that fields often organize themselves into schools is not controversial. It’s not something special to software testing. You see it in education, business, psychology, physics (etc., etc.)

It’s also common for the members of the dominant school to see themselves as the entire field. They often see other groups that try to differentiate themselves from the main stream as self-promoting spinoffs, as advocates for minor variations from core views that “everyone” shares. One of the reasons that people will intentionally form and announce a school is to create a rallying point. They want a place where likeminded people can share views without being drowned out by the dominating majority, a platform for publishing and refining their set of ideas.

These rallying points are even more important when the field is engaging in political work. When I say “political,” I mean anything involving power and control. For example, standards committees are political. My experience with the IEEE software engineering standards committees is that I can become a member but my views will have no impact on the standard. The way that people who hold minority views gain more impact is to organize, so that many people together intentionally say the same things. This has an impact. For example, agile approaches (I think of contextual thinking and exploratory testing/development as agile approaches) are much more acceptable than they were 20 years ago. That is largely because of advocacy by many people, speaking together. Political work requires political action.

You can hear more about social dynamics in the debate.

Unfortunate Misbehavior

Rex’s central argument is that the characterization of the field in terms of conflicting schools is inaccurate and would be better replaced by a description of alternative strategies. Along with this argument comes a complaint, which I see as the emotional charge behind his argument. He complains about harsh statements from some people who call themselves Context-Driven and call themselves leaders of the Context-Driven School. I think he’s well-justified in feeling that some people are behaving badly and that they have treated him badly.

If you see yourself as a member of the Context-Driven School, let me suggest that as individuals, we get to choose how far we go down the path of divisiveness:

• We can choose to compare a school of thought to a religion, but we don’t have to say that.
• We can choose to say that anyone who isn’t a proponent of the school can’t understand what we have to say, but we don’t have to say that.
• We can choose to say that everyone belongs to a school (even the people who insist they do not), but we don’t have to say that.

Statements like these are not factual and, to the best of my knowledge, they are not rooted in facts. They reflect choices about how people with differing views should interact.

I think some of the people who say things like this would market themselves more honestly (and in my view, tarnish the Context-Driven Testing brand less) if they would identify themselves as the Rapid Software Testing (TM) school. I would disagree with their approach and their tone, but I wouldn’t feel obliged to assert that such views are not context-driven (see for example, my posts Censure People for Disagreeing with Us? and Context-Driven Testing is Not a Religion and Contexts Differ: Recognizing the Difference between Wrong and WRONG. )

More details of my responses to Rex’s complaints are in the debate itself and in the notes I prepared before the debate at Kaner’s STPCon Debate Slides.

— Cem Kaner

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