Reification fallacy

...I wonder if "reification fallacy" is itself an example of a reification fallacy...

Today's Black Swan Lesson

No evidence of bugs != evidence of no bugs

Black Swans in Testing

I'm currently reading The Black Swan, and am wondering if a showstopper bug, the sort that will wipe your HD and bring down all your servers could be considered to be black swans. The day the chicken goes to the chopping block...

Plain English Continued...

Heard at a Software Testing conference:

"Transient Contracting Resource" .... Oh you mean "contractor"?

"Testing Centres of Excellence" ..... Test team.

What are people trying to hide by using words like that? It's just peacocking.

Plain English

I'm a huge proponent of Plain English. I try to avoid jargon, and corporate-speak as much as possible. I used to shudder whenever I heard a particular manager at a company always use the word "learnings." We already have a noun form of the word learning: Lessons!

Even though I am conscious of the use of Plain English, I still sometimes hear myself utter phrases such as "I just want to check we're on the same page". I will often stop myself, and apologise. It's amazing how many closet anti-corporate-speak people will suddenly brighten up and say "I hate those phrases too!"

I came across this list of "100 banned words" from an organisation in the UK: http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=7701430

This is my confession of words and phrases I use from this list:

# enhance
# facilitate
# framework
# good practice
# holistic <--- I'm sad this has become overused.
# output <--- I may be using it in a different context than the compilers of this list intended though
# risk based
# single point of contact


My main bugbear (oh no, was that a cliche?) is verbing nouns (see what I did there?). What are yours?

Postmodern testing

I made the following comment on Cem Kaner's blog in response to the idea that Software Testing could be a social science:

The idea of software testing being a social science is very interesting. I studied psychology at university, and now find myself a software tester. I see a lot of parallels between the different schools of psychology vs the different schools of software testing. I see the recent emergence of post-modern methods such as social deconstructionism, and critical social psychology, mirroring the recent emergence of exploratory testing as a mainstream testing method. Both are more of a qualitative approach vs a quantitative approach.

For example, using psychometric tests, you have a person follow a questionnaire, answer a whole heap of questions, add up the results, and voila! You get a result. Without ever having necessarily met the person. This is similar to the scripted approach to software testing where you can write your scripts, achieve 100% coverage based on your requirements document, and voila! You get a result. Without ever having actually interacted with the application.

Reflecting on that, I'm now wondering whether exploratory testing could be considered a postmodern approach to software testing. I'll think about it some more, and do some research, and hopefully I can revisit this idea.

The ISO Standardisation of OOXML in 17 Easy Steps

Finally, an explanation even I can understand