oh this is CUTE

Cartoon on women on tv

...for sarcastic meanings of the word "cute" :)

( Musing on the comic )

Testing: buzzwords

There's a lot of testing buzzwords that just make me sigh. But I like "Context-Driven". The link has good info, but the example was the "aha" moment for me:

Consider two projects:

1. One is developing the control software for an airplane. What "correct behavior" means is a highly technical and mathematical subject. FAA regulations must be followed. Anything you do -- or don't do -- would be evidence in a lawsuit 20 years from now. The development staff share an engineering culture that values caution, precision, repeatability, and double-checking everyone's work.


2. Another project is developing a word processor that is to be used over the web. "Correct behavior" is whatever woos a vast and inarticulate audience of Microsoft Word users over to your software. There are no regulatory requirements that matter (other than those governing public stock offerings). Time to market matters -- 20 months from now, it will all be over, for good or ill. The development staff decidedly do not come from an engineering culture, and attempts to talk in a way normal for the first culture will cause them to refer to you as "damage to be routed around".

Testing practices appropriate to the first project will fail in the second.
Practices appropriate to the second project would be criminally negligent in the first.

The testing is designed for the project, not the project for testing.