test objects design

Reading Brian Marick’ s paper (PDF version) “Methodology Work is Ontology Work” and I love the way he starts it “In this paper, I’m going to abuse the word “ontology”. A Very good 9 pages of reading.

What Brian is postulating about Agile ontology, as “distinct from the standard “software engineering” ontology, which is much more dour. In it, entropy is a fundamental thing inthe world. Software development is a struggle against entropy that will inevitably fail as the product devolves into Foote and Yoder’s “big ball of mud”", is a possibility of “basic nature of a program is to be incomplete and flux, to solicit then beings. Given the right practices, social organizations, workspace arrangement, and tools, the software will be fundamentally supportive of human striving.Software has it in its nature to be soft, if only we know the right way to accommodatethat nature.”

Software is written by human beings striving to implement in time and space their gestures of commitment to a world they want to live in. A more common way this can be expressed that software implements the business requirements which begs a quesions: aren’t business requirements somewhat partial expressions of a world we strive for?

Technorati Tags: Agile Testing