Tester Remains On-Stage; Enter Beauty, Stage Right
Are you skeptical yet? If you are, I canât say I blame you. To many people, the word âtestingâ brings up images of drop-dead simple pointing and clicking, or following a boring script written by someone else. They think itâs a simple job, best done by simple people who, wellâ¦at least you donât have to pay them much. I think thereâs something wrong with that.
Again, the above isnât critical investigation; itâs checking. And checking certainly isnât beautiful, by any stretch of the word. And beauty is important.
Let me explain.
In my formative years as a developer, I found that I had a conflict with my peers and superiors about the way we developed software. Sometimes I attributed this to growing up in the east coast versus the midwest, and sometimes to the fact that my degree was not in computer science but mathematics.[75] So, being young and insecure, I went back to school at night and earned a Masterâs degree in computer information systems to âcatch up,â but still I had these cultural arguments about how to develop software. I wanted simple projects, whereas my teammates wanted projects done ârightâ or âextensibleâ or âcomplete.â
Then one day I realized: they had never been taught about beauty, nor that beauty was inherently good. Although I had missed a class or two in my concentration in computer science, they also missed something I had learned in mathematics: an appreciation of aesthetics ...
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