Rahul Verma: My Petty Bits

Dear Testers,

I had written two posts in the year 2010 dealing with the concept of Testing vs Checking (challenging it). For the record, I consider Checking as a part of all forms of Testing. I don’t acknowledge the versus argument in the way it is positioned in some circles. I am a pluralist. In my mental model, everything is a part of testing and have multi-dimensional relationships. So, there is no point in the versus questions w.r.t. testing at all. It’s like comparing a car with a steering wheel.

Checks are one such entity in my testing model and are placed in the vicinity of assertions, both with a finer distinction in terms of their role in all forms of testing.

All Testing is Confirmatory
https://lnkd.in/eYCkuB6g

Michael Bolton replied to the above post as All Testing is (NOT) Confirmatory
https://lnkd.in/eRzyU8RK

My follow-up post was this:

All Testing is Confirmatory – Part II
https://lnkd.in/evKgHiAy

The comments of the posts go lengthier than the posts themselves and delve deeper into the arguments. There was deep participation by Shrini Kulkarni in the comments. These days, I avoid getting into these arguments in a written medium beyond a few exchanges as I realised we don’t get anywhere with this approach when we have fundamentally different world views.

Note 1: If the distinction helps you, go ahead and continue following it, as long as you use it in understanding and talking about your own work or expressing your thoughts. When they overlap with my sphere of expression, where tests and checks have their own meaning, while I appreciate that you mean differently, I am not going to compromise on my mental models. It means you will also need to assimilate what I mean by the word test and check, rather than falling into the trap of right or wrong. We will need to manage the conversation. Debates have their own place, but every conversation can not be a debate.

Note 2: I wrote the above articles in 2010. Today I have a maturer model to express my thinking in the form of the AEIOU Model of Pluralistic Testing. The above articles are for your reference, because they date back to when this distinction was getting introduced to the community.