Cem Kaner interview on uTest blog

Cem Kaner’s interview on the uTest blog talks mostly about his new book, but was especially interesting when it got to the part about emerging trends.

<Scientific> communities are sometimes characterized as moving between two dysfunctional extremes, with stagnation at one end and fragmentation at the other. In the stagnant extreme, everyone pretends to believe in the same things (or the dissenters are unable to gain attention) and the field makes slow, incremental progress. Dissenters break out of this by forming schools that gain influence and add a lot of creative tension.

Testing seems particularly stuck in a period of stagnation at the moment.  Hopefully time will see some interesting new schools form.  I put myself in the ‘dissenter’ category right now with respect to what I would once have considered my testing ‘community’, the context-driven school.  I know I’m not the only one that feels this way, but I’m not in a place in my life right now to voice my feelings on the subject.

Kaner and Bach’s public split is certainly evidence of fragmentation.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.