AMA Epistemology Answer: The Perception of Truth

Partially back from a two month hiatus - apologies this took forever but it never left my backlog!
From the original moment: AMA about Epistemology - the practice of testing

Ady asked: "Through similar research into thinking in testing, I believe the quality of software is intrinsically linked to the quality of thinking that goes into software development. So. How does the quality of thinking shape what we perceive as truth? "

I first need to clarity 'truth' as 'perceived.' There's many things in life where 'truth' is a matter of perspective. What is true for you may not be true for someone else. When I speak of truth in engineering, it is always from the system's perspective. In this sense, truth is not open to the  interpretation. If I'm using a calculator system and input "2+2" and get the output "6" then 6 is true from the perspective of the system. We could clearly argue 6 is not correct, but it is true - the system took input, and gave output. The output is always the truth of the system.  

If we can accept that interpretation, then I'm reading the heart of this question as "can we better align our beliefs with the truth of the system if we have an upfront high-quality thought process?"

The answer I believe is yes. The more you think about the design of the system in all it's dimensions and from multiple angles and perspectives, the more honed your ideas will be, and thus the better aligned you'll be to the actual truth of the system once developed. However this may sound very familiar at this point: this is a waterfall based methodology. 

You should spend an adequate time gathering requirements, making acceptance criteria, and building proof of concepts. But you can never craft a perfect system in requirements documents. There's no silver bullet or golden rule on how long to spend in requirements. In the end, you will need to build something with an inherent level of unknowns, and you will need to test the resulting system to surface the truth. This is the space quality engineers fill: the acceptance that no system can be perfectly built, no matter how much thought can be put into it.