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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Sat, 01 May 2004

The continuity of practice subcultures

Testing and programming are two independent technical subcultures. I think they need to talk to each other more. Within agile projects, I favor moving toward a single blended technical culture.

To that end, I'm reading Peter Galison's Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, a modest pamphlet (955 pages) on two subcultures in experimental particle physics. He talks about how those subcultures evolved, how they interacted, how they competed for attention, and how they blended in the end.

He tags one subculture with "Image". It's comprised of, roughly, those people who take cool pictures of elementary particle tracks. Their goal is "the production of images of such clarity that a single picture can serve as evidence for a new entity..." (p. 19) The second subculture is "Logic" (after electronic logic). In it are the people who build things like Geiger counters: "These counting (rather than picturing) machines aggregate masses of data to make statistical arguments for the existence of a particle..." (p. 19)

So. Here's a gleaning. Subcultures have continuity. They change in response to the outside world (changes in physical theory, for example), but they also persist and evolve according to their own internal logic.

What sources of continuity does Galison find? And are there similar sources in the two subcultures I care about?

1. Pedagogical continuity: When it came to cloud chambers, Wilson taught Millikan taught Anderson taught Glaser... Moreover, there's relatively little overlap between the Image and Logic "teaching lineages".

   Like many worthwhile professions, much of testing and programming is taught through apprenticeship. That's especially true for testing, whose practice hasn't (until recently) had much of a toehold in academia.

2. Technical continuity: Image people needed to know about track analysis, photography, and micrometry. Logic people needed to know about high voltages, logic circuit design, and gas discharge physics. Skills did not translate easily across the divide.

   I'd like to think the divide between testing and programming is more bridgeable, but it nevertheless exists. It's a problem that the technical skills one side pridefully brings to bear seem not that important to the other.

3. Demonstrative or epistemic continuity: This is the kicker. Roughly, the Image people believed strong arguments rested on pictures, whereas the Logic people believed they rested on statistics. Each found the other's evidence (and arguments about evidence) somewhat unpersuasive.

   I say it's the kicker because it seems to me the big divide between testing and programming is what counts as a valid and noteworthy work. To programmers - again, roughly - it's a product that does progressively more stuff. It's new business value. To testers, it's a product that's progressively more capable of surviving attack. It's lack of negative business value.

Since blending subcultures is my goal - rightly or wrongly - I should be attentive to each of these three kinds of continuity. The blend needs each of them.

## Posted at 16:42 in category /agile [permalink] [top]