Schools of Testing and Schools of Music

There’s been a lot of controversy on the schools of software testing lately, in Paul Gerrard’s blog here and here and here; in James Bach’s blog here and to some extent here, and on the software-testing mailing list. I also had a pleasant chat with Paul Gerrard at coffee break and lunch today at EuroSTAR 2008.

Jonathan Kohl and I did a paper on the parallels between testing and music at CAST 2008; you can find it in the .PDF of the proceedings. Maybe something about music can offer us a way out of the dilemma.

There are lots of ways of approaching music, as a performer, a listener, or a critic. (I use the word “critic” in the sense of someone who tries to understand, describe and contextualize the work, not in the sense of someone who tries to disparage it, although these are often confused.) These different approaches are sometimes called styles, or forms, or traditions. They may be informed by a certain kind of thinking, certain aspects of practice, certain instrumentation. Specific pieces of work and specific composers are considered by their communities (or by others, or by themselves) as exemplars of these styles. Some play music just for fun. Some play on an amateur basis, but are deeply committed to the pursuit. Some play professionally, but as for all kinds of working people, some of the pros may be ambivalent about their commitment to the art. Some people talk casually about the styles, the pieces, and the artists. Others—the critics—are more serious, and study the styles, typically focusing on one or another of them. The quality of their criticism is conditioned at least in part by the ways in which they consider the similarities and differences.

Some artists choose to categorize themselves as practioners of a specific style (“I’m a blues guy”; “I’m a classical musician”.) Some artists, not wanting to be pigeonholed, refuse to categorize themselves. Yet categorization happens anyway, sometimes by admirers and sometimes by detractors.

To me, to reject or even to neglect the differences between one kind of music and another is silly, if you’re trying to become a better student of the field. Classifications can help to understand the differences and the similarities between one form of music and another—or they can be used to reject some forms. “That’s just a bunch of noise!” When her work is labelled that way, the artist has the option to reject the statement outright, essentially ignoring it, or to engage the criticism by providing counter-arguments as to why someone might value this style or this piece. And so we learn.

Within an established tradition in music, there are three rough groupings. Some artists recognize other styles and incorporate them into their work. These tend to be in the avant-garde, which pushes the boundaries of the style to some degree. Other artists tend simply to work within the style, often pretty much ignoring the edges or the roots. Then there are the staunch traditionalists—those who believe that every innovation in a genre after a certain point in history is an accretion and mischief.

So it is with testing. The notion of schools (call them what you will—styles, camps, religions, bodies of thought, cultural frameworks) is a notion that can help us to frame discussion and to identify different approaches to testing in theory and in practice. People can identify context and choices, with the goal of explaining or understanding their own styles or others. There may be controversy between the schools—their adherents, their detractors, and those who have to watch—but the idea that this kind of categorization shouldn’t exist, or should be considered prohibited speech, strikes me as silly.

In my conversation with Paul today, Paul compared the use of schools to a kind of bigotry or racism. That risk is there, but like differentiating between cultures, it depends how you intend to use the distinctions. The question is not whether there are differences; there are, they’re real, and it can be handy to identify them. I observed that far from being inherently antagonistic, the schools concept could allow us to be more polite to one another. As an example, Paul suggested (not too seriously) that if you’re not being context driven, you’re stupid. I could agree with that, but it might be more productive to say that if you’re not context driven, you might be driven by analytical-school values. This reminded me of Jerry Weinberg’s advice that when you think someone is being irrational, reframe your position to think of them as being rational from the perspective of a different set of values.

Have you noticed that some people who are staunch advocates of equivalence class partitioning and boundary value analysis seem virulently opposed to the idea of differentiating between schools of thought?