What brings controversy: incomprehensible computer or people incomprehension?
Submitted by Ainars Galvans on Tue, 24/03/2009 - 10:37.
perspectives
Do you know the history of four color theorem. It was the first major math theorem to be proven with extensive computer assistance. Which caused a lot of controversy ... (among mathematicians).
I somehow recalled this fact when reading Matthew considering history of published testing ideas . I believe he choose to ignore events (such as Year 2000 problem, trend of cutting IT department costs a few years later, etc.) to concentrate on inventions (methodologies and tools). I support Matthew in his work, but I’m afraid I can’t contribute as I made my career ignoring most of the publications. I think I made my career for historical reason: I chose to excel as a tester and worked hard while others struggled to find path to development career (at that time tester was seen as second-class citizen at least in my company and I proved this to be wrong). It would not be enough today, I'm afraid.
One more illustration from math field
I used to teach under-graduates going to international math Olympiads. I was not personally involved by I still remember a story about teacher who rejected solution based on Reducto ad absurdum (To prove something is true, assume it's false, and keep going until you find a contradiction.) The point was (as far as I remember) that they don’t teach that method in school, so it is wrong to use method without proving that method itself is correct. After some debates with other teacher the solution was accepted as perfectly correct, but the story is fresh in my memory now after more than 15 years…
Conservative as a cause of Controversy
I must admit that it was only a few years ago when begun a serious industry (ideas) research. My biggest surprise was controversy. It makes sense to test boundaries, but this was almost the only idea agreed by everyone. Everything else was an ongoing revolution and it still is. Well at least I see it so…
I’m afraid that I was one of the contributors. I chose to ignore the inventions that were not adopted in our company. I was afraid to adopt ideas developed outside company or even outside my team. I developed my own. It was surprised how my developed ideas and inventions was rejected by other teams. Why was I surprised? They only did the same what I’ve done previously. Conservatively, rejecting anything mismatching out “best practices”…
I somehow recalled this fact when reading Matthew considering history of published testing ideas . I believe he choose to ignore events (such as Year 2000 problem, trend of cutting IT department costs a few years later, etc.) to concentrate on inventions (methodologies and tools). I support Matthew in his work, but I’m afraid I can’t contribute as I made my career ignoring most of the publications. I think I made my career for historical reason: I chose to excel as a tester and worked hard while others struggled to find path to development career (at that time tester was seen as second-class citizen at least in my company and I proved this to be wrong). It would not be enough today, I'm afraid.
One more illustration from math field
I used to teach under-graduates going to international math Olympiads. I was not personally involved by I still remember a story about teacher who rejected solution based on Reducto ad absurdum (To prove something is true, assume it's false, and keep going until you find a contradiction.) The point was (as far as I remember) that they don’t teach that method in school, so it is wrong to use method without proving that method itself is correct. After some debates with other teacher the solution was accepted as perfectly correct, but the story is fresh in my memory now after more than 15 years…
Conservative as a cause of Controversy
I must admit that it was only a few years ago when begun a serious industry (ideas) research. My biggest surprise was controversy. It makes sense to test boundaries, but this was almost the only idea agreed by everyone. Everything else was an ongoing revolution and it still is. Well at least I see it so…
I’m afraid that I was one of the contributors. I chose to ignore the inventions that were not adopted in our company. I was afraid to adopt ideas developed outside company or even outside my team. I developed my own. It was surprised how my developed ideas and inventions was rejected by other teams. Why was I surprised? They only did the same what I’ve done previously. Conservatively, rejecting anything mismatching out “best practices”…