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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Sun, 06 Nov 2005

Errors as essential

[Austin's procedure] consists in recognizing that [...] failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration; then, in a move that is almost immediately simultaneous [...] it excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the [...] phenomenon being considered.

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 15.

This puts me in mind of a commonplace of UI design: that a popup error dialog should prod you to reexamine the system. Can it be changed to make the error impossible? or a modal dialog unneeded? For the latter, see Ward Cunningham's Checks pattern language, which - if I recall correctly - treats entering bad input as an inherent part of entering input, something to be fixed at the human's convenience, not something to interrupt the flow.

It also reminds me of my insistence that Agile projects are learning projects, and that you're probably not learning how to do something right unless unless you try variations and extensions that turn out to be wrong. But there has to be a way of talking about it that doesn't use the words "mistake" or "wrong" because - hard as it may be to believe - a lot of people think those are bad things.

## Posted at 22:01 in category /misc [permalink] [top]