Some days ago I had the occasion to make a presentation regarding testing. But I had one dilemma before. How could I have been able to do this presentation without me being able to say what testing is for me?
There is a concept, praxis, that started my quest to understand how theory can inform and make sense in the practices, in my day to day work. And when I say practices I think about practices in testing, management and programming. There are lots of them. I began to cover some of them, please look here for examples. The concept I am speaking about now is the complexity theory.
Is not easy to explain this complexity thing. I like how Edgar Morin explains the complexity. For him complexity is like a tissue or fabric of inseparable associated diverse elements. But at a second look, those elements represent: events, actions, interactions, feedbacks, hazards.
I like the header image because it is trying visually to show this complexity. You can see in the image some dots, connection between the dots, but it also shows patterns that can be formed (different lines, triangles, pentagons, polygons and so many others). In our day to day life those dots might represent things like:
- Technical details in our product(components and objects relating to each other, the fractality of the code, mixing up unrelated abstraction and so on)
- Humans with their roles working on a product
- Risks
- Requirements
And then there is another important detail and that is the fact that humans think in patterns.
So, what is testing for me? Testing is about finding those relevant patterns that matters within a complex system.
Those patterns might mean whatever is relevant in spotting problems within the product or process. These patterns are not static, they continuously change.