I am writing a series of posts on LinkedIn regarding the automation in testing class called Rapid Software Testing Focused: Automation that Michael Bolton will have in Romania organized by the Code Camp Romania .
This time I wanted to write about the collaboration between Michael and James Bach . I asked James Bach to tell me how it is working with Michael. Here is what he told me:
Working with Michael is like washing a dog, if you are the dog. Most dogs don’t want to take a bath, but they tolerate it, and feel better after.
Michael reviews all my important writing. Sometimes we spend hours going over it. Sometimes he doesn’t like my writing and can’t tell me why.
In those cases, he becomes the dog, and I feel like a human trying to understand why the dog keeps barking.
But usually, I’m the dog, covered in soap and waiting for the process to end.
It’s a very annoying process that always improves my work.
Years ago, I came up with the idea of “sapient testing,” which means testing that requires a human to perform. The concept caught on in Context-Driven Testing circles, but after a couple years, we discovered a serious problem: non-sapient testing meant testing that doesn’t require a human, but people were using it instead to mean “stupid testing.” This was a serious enough problem that we had to retire that phrase.
It was Michael who found an alternative, which was to distinguish between testing and checking.
Testing (all testing) requires a human, but checking does not. I didn’t like this idea at first. It took Michael a couple hours to convince me. This has become a tremendously helpful distinction for us, giving us a crisp and simple way to talk about the aspects of testing that need human judgement and those that don’t.
And when he talks about this, James is also showing an image with a dog having a bath. Is about the title image of this blog post.
Image credits: Sonja Rachbauer, Mettmach, Austria