Blogs, Darwin and the Testing Eco-System

#softwaretesting

A bit of divergent thinking...

I started about by thinking about testing blogs recently, progressed through evolution and ended up thinking about the testing eco-system (or natural habitat) - or really the testing evolutionary tree.

Blogging

I wondered what testers get out of blogging and in a "rare" moment where my glass was only half full (as opposed to half-empty) I could only come up with the positives. Here.

I like and agree with both James and Matthew's comments. Blogging is definitely one way of getting a body of knowledge out there (or views and opinions) - true sometimes they are or have to be bland, as James says.

But it was Matthew's reference to a sponge that triggered my Darwinian thinking...

Evolutionary trail...

There is room for sponges in the testing eco-system - some people have to start somewhere. Jumping on a Darwinian-theme: it's quite ok for someone to absorb information and get a few ideas under their belt.

James wrote an interesting post where he was saying that those methods/techniques will always be someone elses methods/techniques - it won't be the testers (that has sponged/absorbed them) until they develop them further and make them their own.

Hence Darwin - this is the evolution of the sponge into something more advanced (not sure what the next step up the evolutionary scale is - biology was never a hot topic for me). But the important thing is that they do "evolve" and don't lie stagnant...

Following the evolutionary analogy, I guess the spammers are lower down on the scale, maybe the hackers are more advanced. The sniping commentators are probably on another evolutionary side-branch and evolution will ultimately take care of them.

Maybe the evolution analogy is over-doing it -> people learn, develop and progress (hopefully.)

Phylogenetic Tree

However, all this thinking about evolution made me wonder about an evolutionary tree for software testing.

I really like to think of the testing eco-system/habitat as something comparable to an evolutionary tree - there are many branches, many ideas that have developed, transformed and evolved.

This is something to chart the different strands for test techniques and test approaches - one tree for each view. This is something I'll continue to work on.

Suggestions for the test evolutionary tree?