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THE LAWS OF SOFTWARE PROCESS
The Job of Methodology
The act of getting a question answered is usually much easier than rec-
ognizing the conditions under which we have to ask a question — that is,
getting the question is harder than getting the answer. Because the main
work is in defining the question in sufficient detail to elicit an answer, we
can infer the real job of a methodology:
The real job of a methodology is to tell us what we do not know.
The finding and fixing of bugs in programs while testing is a good example
of this 3OI (2OI) → 1OI, 0OI cycle. There are two discrete stages to testing:
1. Find a bug. The bug manifests itself through some externally identi-
fiable event such as a system crash. I call this moment an epiphany
of knowledge. Basically ...