Welcome To Holistic Testing
It’s been a while since my last post, but I had to give it some time off so people didn’t become spoiled with my post frequency. I’ve had some positive feedback and some really great emails about the Analogy I used below. Some people were just interested in what I meant by it all and asked more detailed questions and others jumped to conclusions as to what I was getting at and had already decided on what I meant. However, they all had a very simple common link between them. Change. This is, I think, what the essence of Holistic Testing is, or what I envision it to be. It might sound stupid, I know, and it might sound like I’m sitting over here in the middle of a room cross-legged on the floor with a bong, but I’m not. Change is such a simple concept. It’s easy for us to wrap our minds around so it seems very easy and trivial. We do it all the time, right? While we might believe that we change, we really do not make drastic changes in our life. We don’t take risks, even when we believe that we’re right. We don’t want to make these massive changes because we fear the end result. This is what much of this analogy was meant to illustrate.
Explained:
This quote is extremely simple, just like the concept of change. The truth is that there are always answers swirling all around us. There are better solutions for what we’re doing today, but we refuse to acknowledge them because it’s too much hassle to explore these ideas. It’s the red tape, the ridicule, the conflict. Again, fear is the driving factor preventing us from this change.
There were a couple highlights in the longer quote. The first is representative of our intuition. That voice in our head. That feeling that something just isn’t right, or is right. Your “gut”. So in this case, the rabbit hole is change. We don’t know where it goes, we can’t explain what it might be, and we certainly don’t know what to expect when we get there. We know this change will be good, but there is no way for us to justify it. Just as we can’t justify quality. We say our processes are sound because we are releasing a “quality” product. How do we know what quality is. Quality is a subjective standard that varies person-to-person and application to application. So why are our processes standardized? So we can make a report look pretty? “See how the line goes down? That means the software is good.” This short rant illustrates my second highlighted quote of the post. Our mind is our prison. We know things aren’t right, but we don’t and won’t do anything about it because we simply can’t offer any tangible reason to change……and they have a line going down.
“Realizing Potential and Removing Barriers of Conventional Thought”
Without removing these barriers of conformance that we build every day as a manner of containing intelligent ideas, we will never progress forward. This quote is more for QA Managers. As Managers it’s our responsibility to act like Morpheus. We may not be the one, but we have to be the people to promote this creative and innovative thinking. We need to stop chasing our employees down a cattle chute that just leads them to slaughter, because that’s what’s happening. They’re being set up for failure in the end because they aren’t being prepared to deal with and enact change themselves.
As long as we test to the accepted and standardized methods of testing, we will always have deniability. In this safe zone we might live a very content to just sit idly by for the remainder of our lives. We’ll wait for someone else to make the change? What if we are the ones, though? What if the concepts we find so simple are actually very complex? If that is the case then we will never realize our potential. We truly need to take a leap of faith, sometimes, in order to enact change. However, they are the gatekeepers and we may only have one shot to enact this change, so this is our training ground. This is where we will prepare for our fight. This is where we must find the evidence and support to create this shift.
“The Epilogue: A New Beginning for Testing”
Mostly because who doesn’t love that last scene of The Matrix? There is one part in particular which speaks about possibility. This is one major constricting factor in our current age of testing. Exploratory Testing is helping to provide us with at least a method of testing that can be structured and still provide space for creativity. So what is Holistic Testing? Is it a method of testing? No, it’s not a method of testing, it’s not a defined process, I think of it as more of an intellectual framework. A buffet of ideas and improvements, discussion and debate.
The reason I chose the term “Holistic Testing” isn’t based on the medical reference. However, it does inherit some of the main characteristics. It’s not likely to be a popular opinion in most SQA circles. It goes against what we THINK is the “norm”. It is heavily based in education. Education, not only of testing, but of the product, the marketplace, the application, etc. It involves allowing the tester to become fully invested in the project, not just the testing. It promotes accepting responsibility and taking accountability. It seeks meaning. We have metrics and reports and charts that mean absolutely NOTHING! Squat! Not one measures quality. There isn’t one that measures quality. However, if we take a more holistic approach to testing the system as a whole, like an ecosystem, not just an organism within that ecosystem, then we can much more easily identify the impact of our efforts. This is what Holistic Testing “is”.