Beauty Is the Nature of This Work
It is popular among people who think, talk, and write about the process of software development to construct analogies to describe the work. They say “Software development is like…” and “When we do software development, it is as if we were doing…”.
There are no such analogies in this essay. It is very clear: developing software is not like the work of a performing artist; developing software is the work of a performing artist. Evaluating software quality is not like evaluating an artistic performance; it is evaluating an artistic performance. This is not theory; this is really how high-performing software development teams go about their work. We can make great improvements to our own work when we acknowledge this.
I very much hope that the software development community as a whole, and software testers in particular, not only admit but celebrate the fundamentally aesthetic process of creating software. Whether we recognize it explicitly or not, this is the reason we can talk about Beautiful Testing at all.
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