Rahul Verma: My Petty Bits

Many years ago, I had published the Pluralistic School of Testing, as a personal set of principles for testing. As a continuation of my Embracing Infinity series, I am taking that as a basis, but with a revised version. I have outgrown the idea of a school as a blanket community cover completely. I have also outgrown fancy wordings found in my own writings earlier and embraced simplicity.

This post is not an invitation to join a school of thought. It is an expression of what I think I am as a tester at the point of writing this article. This is critical for you to understand the basis of my future articles. If you don’t understand me, you can not empathise fully with what I write.

I invite you to find and express what you are to yourself.

As you go through the list, you will hate some, love some, ignore some – because you are different and that’s what this article is about.

My Principles, Thoughts and Biases

• I am a living school of thought in myself. In my opinion so are you.
• I have hundreds of teachers to credit but I have not followed any of them in totality. Whatever I know about testing I owe it to them and the follow-up experiments, but my totality is mine. I own my opinions.
• I can refer to my teachers, but not hide behind them when I need to answer something.
• I embrace contradictions. I am fine with carrying mutually contradicting ideas in my mind and use both of them, when I find fit.
• What I don’t know I don’t know. What I know can be wrong. This is the most fundamental form of freedom I expect. You can be wrong too and I am ok with that. That’s a sign of my respect for you.
• Concepts are not more important than people. I would rather spend time with a person of opposing opinion if I like the person. The other way round, I’d rather read the book, if I find value.
• There is no absolutely right way of testing. All methods used by all people for all testing problems, taken together comprise the absolute. (Anekaantvaad)
• I have my own biases. I want to acknowledge them. I also want to keep them when they help me. My experience is my bias. When I say something, I have my own reasons. Challenge that reason to break my bias, when you want to change my mind and you feel like it.
• Mutually conflicting approaches can deliver same value. I focus on value.
• Yen Ken Prakaaren: If not by this manner, I’ll solve it by that manner. I’ll solve the damn problem or outsource to someone who can. Methods are not more important than the problem itself.
• Perfectionists deliver little value. Perfection is an unachievable infinity. I strive to be better, not to be perfect.
• Maxims do not work. My methods are born out of the discovery, tailoring and amalgamation of multiple methods, that work for me. If my writing gives you a sense that I’m on your side and that side happens to be an extreme, read my other writings so that this myth is broken.
• Quality is not an absolute. It is an unachievable infinity. What we achieve is a perception. A multitude of such perceptions exist. A feature from one quality angle could be bug from the perspective of another. What matters is what matters.
• There can never be an absolute assessment of context and risk. This is another unachievable infinity. Subtract these and I do a disservice. Get driven by them, then I am sheep and could be driven by a mistake. Assimilate them into my testing core, there is a better chance of doing lesser mistakes.
• While there is value in focus, I should de-focus and appreciate other aspects to help in better testing in the focus area itself.
• The final answer is in the infinite totality of variables that govern a problem, but I need to start somewhere with a wrong answer, correcting it over time towards becoming better.
• I earn my living by finding flaws in others’ work or by teaching others how to do this. When it comes to criticism of my own work, I (try to) debate constructively. This is my weakest area and I am trying to get better at this since last few years.
• Belonging is a bias. I don’t belong to any particular style of thinking. If I belong, I won’t question. If I won’t question, I would not be a tester any more.
• If I think my methods of testing have worked every single time, either it is a lie or I haven’t experimented enough.
• I am the un-monitored me. Everything else is a facade. This article and this set of principles can not be the exact truth about me even in my own eyes, because of the obvious psychological pressure put by its public nature. This is the best I can come up with.
• I love to explore as that’s my nature.
• I love to code to express testing problems as I like creating. That’s my nature too. I love creating my own tools in my own manner, rather than using tools created by others. That’s my strength as well as weakness. I pick my projects accordingly.
• I think that documenting ideas is a necessity to not to loose information, but the information capturing format matters a lot. I don’t like templates and blind rules. I like diagrammatic and matrix representations with only key ideas captured as text.

The conceptual discontinuity in this series of principles is a natural outcome. I will try not to edit it after publishing it, except if someone points out a glaring language mistake.

If you have read this article and reached till this sentence, you have more patience than me :-). Thanks a lot.

That’s all for now.