Testing the Limits with Cem Kaner – Part III
In part III of our of Testing the Limits interview with Cem Kaner, we discuss why “best practices” is merely a marketing tool; Silicon Valley of yesteryear; his upcoming CAST lecture on investment model and exploratory test automation; the blogs he reads and much more. To recap, here’s part I and part II.
uTest: What’s surprised you the most about the testing industry since you’ve been in the game?
Kaner: Context-dependence was a big surprise to me. It took me about ten years before I reluctantly accepted the idea that my favorite test techniques, attitudes, and life-cycle models were appropriate in situations similar to the ones where I developed my preferences, but not so appropriate in situations that were quite different.
It took me a long time to learn that developing software under a well-specified contract is a common and respectable activity that requires different tradeoffs from mass-market software sold to people who had no say in its design and buy only after it is ready to deliver and only if they like it. It took me a long time to sort out differences between scientific programming (where I started) and consumer software development. It took me even longer to see that testers working in an independent test lab operate under fundamentally different constraints from testers working inside the development company and provided different types of information. And it took well over a decade before I accepted the idea that two different development managers, running essentially the same project, could legitimately want different information from their testers and that it could make sense and be ethical for the two different test groups to structure their work differently, finding or being blind to or ignoring different classes of bugs, in order to satisfy the information needs of their key stakeholders.
The last major event in this chain happened 14 years and two books after I came to Silicon Valley. A client paid me to tour a lot of companies in California, Oregon and Washington. I gave a talk at each place, but I also talked with them about their business models, their testing challenges and methods.
Most of these were good companies with competent testing staff but they did things very differently from each other, often very differently from what I (in my ignorance) would have recommended, but in ways that addressed the risks they were trying to manage. It was already my practice to try to understand what worked at a client site, and why it worked, rather than to evaluate what they were doing against my prejudged ideas. But the diversity in this series of clients was overwhelming. It caused me to abandon many of my favorite ideas about development and testing—not as bad ideas, but as good ones only under suitable circumstances.
uTest: You’re shaping the minds of future testers… so how do you “future-proof” your teachings? And what major changes do you think will impact software testing by the end of this decade?
Kaner: What I DON’T do is try to slow the field down.
I don’t pretend that there are One True Definitions for any testing terms, because different groups of testers see the craft differently and they use their language accordingly. If two testers have different ideas about the purpose and goals of testing, they are likely to have different meanings, or at least different nuances, in their definitions of “test case.” I don’t go to standards boards to try to legislate my favorite meaning as the official one. This effort to lock down a field that is still in motion, still finding itself, will primarily benefit people selling certification courses. In terms of helping their students prepare for the future, I think that this gives an illusion of certainty and uniformity to people who should be training to embrace questionability and diversity.

In part II of our interview with Dr. Cem Kaner, we discuss advice for current and prospective testers; the future of software testing in higher education; tester certifications; the Software Consumer Bill of Rights and more. Catch up by reading
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