What does arguing semantics meaning?
“To be honest, I don’t care what these types of verification are called be it automated checking or manual testing or ministry of John Cleese walks. What I would like to see is investment and respect being paid to testing as a profession rather than arguing with ourselves over semantics.”
My very first job in software development was as a database programmer at a personnel agency. Many times I wrote a bit of new code, I got a reality check: the computer always did exactly what I said, and not necessarily what I meant. The difference was something that I experienced as a bug. Sometimes the things that I told the computer were consistent with what I meant to tell it, but the way I understood something and the way my clients understood something was different. In that case, the difference was something that my clients experienced as a bug, even though I didn’t, at first. The issue was usually that my clients and I didn’t agree on what we said or what we meant. That wasn’t out of ignorance or ill-will. The problem was often that my clients and I had shallow agreement on a concept. A big part of the job was refining our words for things—and when we did that, we often found that the conversation refined our ideas about things too. Those revelations (Eric Evans calls them “knowledge crunching”) are part of the process of software development.
As the only person on my development team, I was also responsible for preparing end-user documentation for the program. My spelling and grammar could be impeccable, and spelling and grammar checkers could check my words for syntactic correctness. When my description of how to use the program was vague, inaccurate, or imprecise, the agents who used the application would get confused, or would make mistakes, or would miss out on something important. There was a real risk that the company’s clients wouldn’t get the candidates they wanted, or that some qualified person wouldn’t get a shot at a job. Being unclear had real consequences for real people.
A few years later, my friend Dan Spear—at the time, Quaterdeck’s chief scientist, and formerly the principal programmer of QEMM-386—accepted my request for some lessons in assembly language programming. He began the first lesson while we were both sitting back from the keyboard. “Programming a computer, ” he began, “is the most humbling thing that you can do. The computer is like a mirror. It does exactly what you tell it to do, and in doing that, it reflects any sloppiness in your thinking or in your way of expressing yourself.”
