Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking
Sometimes I get those anarchistic ideas that may, if voiced at inappropriate moment, seriously damage your reputation, unless you put them in a nice colored gift package of justification and proof. And though some may see this as creating a Pandora box, at the bottom there is always hope of finding an important clue or even leading yourself out of the dead end.
Today's one is the following. Let's say we limit access to any exams or certification systems for any tester with relevant hands-on experience under 2 or 3 years? The same way they do for MBA or certain levels of trainings for the system administrators? Mind you, not information, or books, or trainings, but certification. Because I strongly believe there is a huge difference between critically reading a book and drilling something in order to check certain boxes in test.
Even if you are fully conscious about the fact that your own opinion is different. Or (which is worse) if you have no opinion and take things on faith. Testing is an activity of the scientific type, not a religious practice, and we need to be extremely careful with faith and our ability to say what you think. Test practice proves that a good tester needs to be honest and courageous, because sometime this is exactly what makes the difference between true and false.
So much for the pathos. All the rhetoric boils down to the old question: the chicken or the egg? Education or research+insight? After all, Newton did not learn it in a school. School is something that helps contemporary us to avoid re-inventing the wheel, but using a wheel create something else, more complicated. Or not to waste time trying at least.
Probably higher education for testing is not a bad thing. But there is none and I doubt that there will be anything as clear as, say, diploma in history. Diploma in history proves that you at least have a general idea of what happened in the twentieth century. Does diploma in math or engineering of some kind prove that its owner makes a good tester? I'm not sure.
If I were (and I'm not) given a grant for developing a course for teaching a tester I would say that the major goal of that course would have been to teach a person to think critically, tell between magical and scientific thinking, understand the juxtaposition of an idea and experience and have a guess about why Aristotle bothered to write a book about logic, what he was getting at?
In my anarchistic opinion other kinds of education are ignorable. Yes just like that. Sometimes these skills minus Aristotle and other thing you do not normally face on the daily basis may be learned in a course of life. This is why personally I prefer older people for testing positions to the students. Yes I do believe that working for peanuts prior to getting a job in test will do you nothing but good. Life is the best source of answers. And your human brain is the best learning tool.
I also think that personal traits may be of higher importance than specific skills. The most important traits I've already mentioned above: it is honesty and courage. Testers need to be able to explore the unknown (and humans are generally afraid of it), voice their opinion even at a risk of getting an aggressive reaction. It is important for them to value their own insights and intuition even it they have to counter an authority. Ah, well. Almost forgot. It is useful to be polite, because testing is half-based on laws of diplomacy which means tester has to negotiate always to achieve his/her ends.
How and why this contradicts the early certification practice? Because learning without practice is like eating without exercise. It results in excess of fat on your ass. Even if you may find it useful at the time of famine -- in our far from extremities normal life it may be a useless burden, hampering your progress. By learning someone else's ideas without being critical (and it is hard to be critical if you know nothing on the subject) you gradually lose you ability to think which is not good for an activity of scientific kind which testing is.
Will it work this way? Is my experience enough? Did my biases inspire this post? Probably. After all I'm just an anarchist here and in a vulgar sense too. I just drop my bomb and run away. We'll see what will come of this in a course of time.
So much for the pathos. All the rhetoric boils down to the old question: the chicken or the egg? Education or research+insight? After all, Newton did not learn it in a school. School is something that helps contemporary us to avoid re-inventing the wheel, but using a wheel create something else, more complicated. Or not to waste time trying at least.
Probably higher education for testing is not a bad thing. But there is none and I doubt that there will be anything as clear as, say, diploma in history. Diploma in history proves that you at least have a general idea of what happened in the twentieth century. Does diploma in math or engineering of some kind prove that its owner makes a good tester? I'm not sure.
If I were (and I'm not) given a grant for developing a course for teaching a tester I would say that the major goal of that course would have been to teach a person to think critically, tell between magical and scientific thinking, understand the juxtaposition of an idea and experience and have a guess about why Aristotle bothered to write a book about logic, what he was getting at?
In my anarchistic opinion other kinds of education are ignorable. Yes just like that. Sometimes these skills minus Aristotle and other thing you do not normally face on the daily basis may be learned in a course of life. This is why personally I prefer older people for testing positions to the students. Yes I do believe that working for peanuts prior to getting a job in test will do you nothing but good. Life is the best source of answers. And your human brain is the best learning tool.
I also think that personal traits may be of higher importance than specific skills. The most important traits I've already mentioned above: it is honesty and courage. Testers need to be able to explore the unknown (and humans are generally afraid of it), voice their opinion even at a risk of getting an aggressive reaction. It is important for them to value their own insights and intuition even it they have to counter an authority. Ah, well. Almost forgot. It is useful to be polite, because testing is half-based on laws of diplomacy which means tester has to negotiate always to achieve his/her ends.
How and why this contradicts the early certification practice? Because learning without practice is like eating without exercise. It results in excess of fat on your ass. Even if you may find it useful at the time of famine -- in our far from extremities normal life it may be a useless burden, hampering your progress. By learning someone else's ideas without being critical (and it is hard to be critical if you know nothing on the subject) you gradually lose you ability to think which is not good for an activity of scientific kind which testing is.
Will it work this way? Is my experience enough? Did my biases inspire this post? Probably. After all I'm just an anarchist here and in a vulgar sense too. I just drop my bomb and run away. We'll see what will come of this in a course of time.
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