Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Tue, 03 Feb 2004

Investigative Journalist

[Update: corrected misspelling]

Dave Liebreich talks about people who are not business experts interviewing people who are. He uses investigative journalism as a model. What struck me most was this:

The interviewee *believes* the interviewer has a perspective different from their own, or has an incomplete understanding of some of the areas.

That strikes a chord with me, as I'm interested not just in person X's job, or in person Y's job, but in how they think about each other's job, and in how they attempt to structure their interactions with respect to those thoughts. I'm interesting in what's between roles. That accounts for my interest in boundary objects and in some of the literature on "marginal" or "liminal" people - those who live on the boundaries between cultures and cross-pollinate them. (The Constant Reader will guess that I fancy myself one of those people.)

In another entry, Dave writes:

But I still run scripts with tracing turned on, every now and then, just to get a feel for the rhythm of the system and maybe discover something that is off a beat or two.

Part of what I conceive of as the promise of the Agile methods is that they will help make phrases like "the rhythm of the system" or "what the code is trying to tell us" not seem wacko. They're a groping way of expressing something that has real consequences.

## Posted at 07:11 in category /misc [permalink] [top]