Don’t Think So Close To Me - Managing Critical and Social Distance in Testing – James Bach

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Why do we need testing?

Partly because thinkers make mistakes. How do we find those mistakes? Partly by using a different kind of thinking than that which created the mistake. This is the notion of critical distance– how much difference there is between perspectives or ways of thinking.

Critical distance can be achieved in various ways, one of which is by creating social distance between different roles on the project. But social distance can kill productivity. Eliminating social distance is a big part of Agile. So how can we nurture the diversity and independence of viewpoints and approaches necessary for critical distance without putting up walls that make it hard for us to collaborate?

This is the question I will try to answer in this talk.

About James

James Bach is co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing and author of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. He created the Rapid Software Testing methodology, which he teaches around the world. He is sometimes unpleasant on Twitter.