Dave says I guessed well, but wrong. I'm just a lowly software tester :-) If not enterprise, then what? Schools? Or community servers to replace BigPubs . . . give the sme's a place to congregate, with rankings indicating who is the most interesting blogger to read on each site. Hmmm. I'll be watching.  5:20:00 PM    

A rocket scientist (really!) posted this to a mailing list I read:

Reminds me of a story I heard years ago about a teacher trainee who went to a rural school for teaching practice. She drew a sheep on the board and asked the class to tell her what it was. The farm kids looked at it, and looked at it, and looked at each other, until she got rather nervous, and picked on one little kid.

"You there, what's your name?"
"Johnny, Miss." (Remember this was years ago, when school kids were polite.)
"Well, Johnny, tell me what you think I drew on the board."
"Well, Miss, ....."
"Yes, go on."
"Miss, is it a Liester Border cross?"

11:52:56 AM    

Requirements verification and defect prevention are good, but don't throw away the testers. Paul Tsuda writes

So this is my point: if you're leading a development effort your job is to keep the group's activity focused on the tasks that make a difference in the quality of the delivered product. Since your task is both prevention and appraisal you have to keep the effort balanced on both kinds of activities. Of course, your life will be a lot easier if you concentrate more on prevention, but you can't let that happen. I know it's tempting - when it gets down to the system testing phase almost everyone just wants to get the product validated and out the door so they can start working on something new and more interesting. But the only time "easier" makes sense is if you don't have any competitors. If this is the case, it's much more practical to let customers do the hard work of catching those pesky little bugs. But not everyone has this luxury. Do you?

11:43:34 AM    

Testing is a service we provide to "project management", to help them understand the state of the product.

And it's hard to make jobs in a service organization sound sexy. Because it is hard to get people to understand what lies beyond the recipes and rote activities.

Maybe I should start describing testing like the martial arts:

First you learn the basics, then you learn the advanced stuff, then you realize that the advanced stuff is simply the basics done very well.

And somewhere along the way you start to become enlightened.

In testing, the rote techniques (data-driven tests, boundary cases, etc) and recipes are the basics.

I'm not sure what the advanced stuff is :-)

And enlightenment is when you start to realize that you are not just here to find bugs.

So, testing, to me, *is* sexy.  9:53:23 AM