thoughts from the test eye

We all test as children; we are curious and want to find things out, before we are one year old we want to break things, and after three we ask “What If” questions.
My first ambitious testing journey came many years later.

Still a naive teenager, I started studying Philosophy at the university. It was an easy choice; philosophy was the subject where you could find the most essential truths.
It took me one and a half year of testing philosophical theories to find out I was wrong.

The classes went through the history of philosophy, and each theory was heavily criticized by me (and a classmate), not because I was a stubborn skeptic, but because I was an objectivist looking for real truth.
I met some very interesting philosophers (Heraclites, Spinoza and Wittgenstein being favorites), but the theories did not stand the test; there were flawed arguments and logic holes alongside with incorrect or unjustified assumptions.
I was disappointed, and finally realized everything is grounded in assumptions you can choose to agree with or not. (I’m OK with this now, I even see it as the essence of the charm of life.)
It was not wasted time, this massive falsification was a hard school in logical and artificial thinking, which are key skills for software testers.

A couple of years later I found the best philosophical theory at Kierkegaard (don’t stumble on his Christian dilemmas) who said that “the truth is the subjectivity”.
He did not state that the objective science was wrong, just that they didn’t grasp what is important.
To be human is to be subjective.

So whenever I rant about traditional testing theory, or coverage, or metrics, or expected results, I don’t say that they are wrong; they just don’t capture what is important.
If software is made for humans; testers should use their subjectivity.