Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick
191.8 167.2 186.2 183.6 184.0 183.2 184.6

Fri, 20 Jun 2003

The personal context

At Agile Fusion, I flashed on something about context-driven testing. James Bach said I should write it down.

In the ideal, adding context-driven testing to a project means that the tester observes the context and designs a testing strategy that matches it (while recognizing that the strategy will change as understanding increases).

Reality is less tidy, less rational. First, any particular strategist comes with a bundle of preferences, a set of experiences, and a bag of tricks. The natural first impulse is to do this project like a prior successful one. This project's context has an influence, to be sure, but does it really drive the strategy? Often not, I suspect. The test - perhaps - of context-driven-ness is how readily the strategist recognizes that what appears to be external context is the projection of internal biases.

This is especially tricky because internal biases take on external reality. To be trite, the observer affects the observed. The most important part of context is the people (principle 3). The strategist changes people's goals, activities, assumptions, and beliefs. So early choices shape the context, I suspect often in self-reinforcing ways.

This argues for rather a lot of humility on the part of the strategist. On the other hand, things have to get done. One cannot spend time in an agony of undirected self-doubt. So, an assignment for context-driven testers: tell stories about how you misjudged the context, then recovered. And about how you shaped a project wrongly. My sense is that the effect described here, though hardly insightful, is under-discussed.

## Posted at 05:19 in category /context_driven_testing [permalink] [top]

About Brian Marick
I consult mainly on Agile software development, with a special focus on how testing fits in.

Contact me here: marick@exampler.com.

 

Syndication

 

Agile Testing Directions
Introduction
Tests and examples
Technology-facing programmer support
Business-facing team support
Business-facing product critiques
Technology-facing product critiques
Testers on agile projects
Postscript

Permalink to this list

 

Working your way out of the automated GUI testing tarpit
  1. Three ways of writing the same test
  2. A test should deduce its setup path
  3. Convert the suite one failure at a time
  4. You should be able to get to any page in one step
  5. Extract fast tests about single pages
  6. Link checking without clicking on links
  7. Workflow tests remain GUI tests
Permalink to this list

 

Design-Driven Test-Driven Design
Creating a test
Making it (barely) run
Views and presenters appear
Hooking up the real GUI

 

Popular Articles
A roadmap for testing on an agile project: When consulting on testing in Agile projects, I like to call this plan "what I'm biased toward."

Tacit knowledge: Experts often have no theory of their work. They simply perform skillfully.

Process and personality: Every article on methodology implicitly begins "Let's talk about me."

 

Related Weblogs

Wayne Allen
James Bach
Laurent Bossavit
William Caputo
Mike Clark
Rachel Davies
Esther Derby
Michael Feathers
Developer Testing
Chad Fowler
Martin Fowler
Alan Francis
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Grig Gheorghiu
Andy Hunt
Ben Hyde
Ron Jeffries
Jonathan Kohl
Dave Liebreich
Jeff Patton
Bret Pettichord
Hiring Johanna Rothman
Managing Johanna Rothman
Kevin Rutherford
Christian Sepulveda
James Shore
Jeff Sutherland
Pragmatic Dave Thomas
Glenn Vanderburg
Greg Vaughn
Eugene Wallingford
Jim Weirich

 

Where to Find Me


Software Practice Advancement

 

Archives
All of 2006
All of 2005
All of 2004
All of 2003

 

Join!

Agile Alliance Logo