Taking Testing Seriously

CHAPTER 17Sociology and Software Testing

—By Harry Collins and Michael Bolton

Michael Bolton: So, let's start. Who are you?

Harry Collins: I'm Harry Collins. I am a professor at Cardiff University. I've been writing for a long time about the nature of knowledge. I am a sociologist; I suppose I'm a sociologist of knowledge. Most of my field work has been about the sciences. I've spent 45 years kind of embedded—as journalists like to say—with gravitational wave physicists, as they were trying to do this impossible job of detecting gravitational waves. (But I wasn't really that embedded, except for a period of 10 or 15 years). Much to my astonishment, they did actually detect gravitational waves in my lifetime! I've written four books about that, and I've written lots of books and papers about other sciences too.

But at the same time, because I'd studied knowledge, I noticed, way back in the 80s, that people coming from the expert systems field were saying very silly things about the nature of knowledge. I thought, “I know more about knowledge than that,” and so I wrote some papers and a book on how they were misunderstanding the nature of the knowledge, and they were fairly successful. I have carried on, writing three books about artificial intelligence, along with various papers on computers and knowledge. And I am pleased to see that you guys quite like my work because it fits with the sort of things that you're trying to say as well.

Michael Bolton: It really does. I was looking ...