At EuroSTAR 2013 in Gothenburg there was a striking contrast between messages coming out of tutorials that were taking place at the same time.

Ian Rowland was talking about how we can do amazing things by “thinking the impossible”. Meanwhile, along the corridor I was giving out a much more mundane and downbeat message in my tutorial about how testers can work constructively with auditors.

I was talking about how auditors are allergic to statements of brainless optimism. Plans should be based on evidence that they are achievable, not on wishful thinking that defies the evidence.

You might think Ian was contradicting me, but I was entirely happy with his message when he repeated it in a later keynote.

In my tutorial I referred to a tweet from James Bach that made the telling point that “people who say failure is not an option are in fact selecting the failure option: by driving truth away”.

I backed that up with a slide showing a tiresome and glib illustration of a little man boldly turning “impossible” into “possible”, with two strokes of a pen. That sort of unthinking positivity really riles me.

The unthinking “can do” spirit

As an auditor I regularly reviewed project plans and frequently they were implausibly optimistic. We were rarely in a position to block such plans. It wasn’t our place to do so. That was a decision for operational and IT management. We would comment, but ultimately management was responsible for the decision to proceed and for the consequences.

Only once was I a direct stakeholder. I insisted that a project should be replanned. The intention was to carry out user testing, user training and then start a phased roll-out during the six week English school summer holidays. That’s when every office was running with reduced staff levels. Initially I was rather unpopular, but the project team were quietly relieved once the responsibility was taken out of their hands. They’d been under unreasonable pressure to go live in September. It was never going to happen.

In that case I was able to defend the project team, but more often I saw the damaging effect on staff who were committed to unrealistic, ludicrously optimistic timescales.

I once interviewed a Chief Technology Officer, who candidly admitted that the culture of the company was that it was far better to say “Yes we can” and then emerge from the project sweaty, exhausted and hopelessly late than it was to say at the start how long it would actually take. He said the users were never prepared to accept the truth up front.

I remember another project whose schedule required a vital user expert to be available for 10 days in November. She already had two weeks holiday booked, and was committed to 20 days working for another project, all in November, a total of 40 working days. Of course both projects were business critical, with fixed target dates that had been dumped on them by senior management. Both projects were late – of course.

If auditors are involved early on in the planning of projects they can sniff out such problems, or force them to be confronted. Sometimes projects are well aware of problems that will stop them hitting their targets but they are scared to flag them up. The problem is kicked into the long grass in the hope that dealing with an urgent problem further down the line will be less damaging than getting a reputation for being negative by complaining early on.

That fear might seem irrational, even bizarre, but it is entirely justifiable. I reviewed a development that had had serious problems and was very late. The development team lead had said the schedule was unrealistic given the budget and available staff. She was removed from her role. Her replacement said she could do it. Eventually the development work was completed in about the time the original team lead had predicted. The successor was praised for her commitment, whereas the original team lead was judged to lack the right attitude. Her career was blighted, and she was deeply disillusioned when I interviewed her.

Be lucky! That’s an order!

Usually when senior management overdoses on the gung ho spirit and signs up to the John Wayne school of inspirational leadership the result isn’t “thinking the impossible”. The result is an order to the troops to be lucky – freakishly lucky. This isn’t thinking the impossible. It’s thinking the impossible will happen if we switch off our brains and treat the troops like disposable cannon fodder.

If the results of unthinking, high volume managerial optimism have been appalling in the past then the evidence is that they will be appalling in the future. There has to be a reason to assume things will get better, and brainless optimism provides remarkably poor evidence.

If your experience of following standards, inappropriate “best practices” and excessively prescriptive processes has been dismal then you won’t get better results in future from sheer optimism, force of will and a refusal to acknowledge the truth.

Insistence on trying to do the wrong things better and faster is not only irrational, it is a deep insult to the people whose working lives are being made miserable. If you have experienced persistent failure and insist on continuing to work in the same way then the clear implication is that failure is the fault of the people, the very people who ensured anything worthwhile was ever delivered.

Ian Rowland had a marvellous and inspirational message. Sadly it’s a message that can prove disastrous if it’s picked up by the sort of managers who regard thinking and reflection as a frivolous waste of time. Be inspired by Ian’s message. Just be very careful who you share it with! Yes, thinking the impossible is wonderful. But that really does require thinking, not wishing!

At EuroSTAR 2013 I had a brief disagreement about software testing standards with Stuart Reid. To be more accurate, I was one of a group of sceptics pressing Stuart, who was putting up a battling defence of standards. He has been working on the new standard ISO 29119 and made a very interesting and revealing point. He insisted that the critics of standards don’t understand their true nature; they are not compulsory.

The introduction to standards makes it clear that their use is optional. They become mandatory only if someone insists that they must be applied in a certain context, often by writing them into a contract or a set of in-house development standards. Then, and only then, is it appropriate to talk about compulsion. That compulsion comes not from the standard itself, but from the contract or the managerial directive.

I found that argument unconvincing. Indeed I thought it effectively conceded the argument and amounted to no more than a plea in mitigation rather than a plausible defence.

Even a cursory analysis of this defence reveals that it is entirely specious, merely a statement of the obvious. Of course it is a choice made by people to make standards mandatory, but that choice is heavily influenced by the quite inappropriate status of IEEE 829 and, in all likelihood ISO 29119, as standards. Calling them standards gives them a prestige and authority that would be missing if they were called guidelines. The defenders of standards usually want it both ways. They refer to standards when they are making an implicit appeal to authority. They refer to the standards as guidelines when they are on the defensive. That doesn’t wash. Standards and guidelines are not synonymous.

Stuart’s defence struck me as very interesting because it was entirely consistent with what I have long believed; the rationale behind standards, and their implicit attraction, is that they can be given mandatory status by organisations and lawyers with a poor grasp of software testing.

The standards become justified by the mandatory status assigned to them by non-testers. The justification does not come from any true intrinsic value or any wisdom that they might impart to practitioners. It comes from the aura of the word “standard” and the creators of standards know that this gives them a competitive advantage.

Creating standards is a commercial activity

Standards are not produced on a disinterested “take it or leave it” basis. They do not merely offer another option to the profession. Standards are created by people from the companies who will benefit from their existence, the companies who will sell the services to implement the new standard. In my experience heavyweight, document-driven processes require large numbers of expensive consultants (though not necessarily highly skilled consultants). Creating standards is a commercial activity. The producers of standards are quite consciously creating a market for the standards.

If the creators of standards were merely expanding the market to create a profitable niche for themselves that might not be a big deal. However, the benefit that accrues to them comes at the the expense of everyone else.

It comes at the expense of the testers who are frequently committed to following inappropriate and demoralising practices.

It comes at the expense of their employers who are incurring greater and unnecessary costs for results that are poorer than they need be.

It comes at the expense of the whole testing profession. The standards encourage a dangerous illusion. They feed the hunger to believe, against all the evidence, that testing, and software development in general, are neat, essentially linear activities that can be be rendered orderly and controllable with sufficient advance documentation. Standards feed the illusion that testing can be easier than it really is, and performed by people less skilled than are really needed.

As I said in my EuroSTAR tutorial last week, testing is not meant to be easy, it’s meant to be valuable.

Good contracts or bad contracts?

It is understandable that the contract lawyers find standards attractive. Not only do standards offer the lawyers the illusion that they promote high quality and define the correct way for professionals to work, they also offer the lawyers something they can get their teeth into. A standard makes it easier to structure a contract if you don’t know about the subject area. The standard doesn’t actually have to be useful. The point is that it helps generate deliverables along the way, and it requires the testers to work in a way that is easy to monitor.

Contracts are most useful when they specify the end, or the required value; not when they dictate how teams should reach the destination. Prescriptive contracts can turn unwarranted assumptions about the means into contractually mandatory ends.

I once faced what looked like a horrendously difficult challenge. I had to set up a security management process for a large client, who wanted assurance that the process would work effectively from the very start. This had been interpreted by my employer as meaning that the client required a full-scale, realistic test, with simulated security breaches to establish whether they would be detected and how we would respond. This would have been very difficult to arrange, and extremely expensive to carry out. Failure to deliver on the due date would have resulted in heavy weekly penalties until we could comply. However, the requirement was written into the contract so I was told we would have to do it.

I was sceptical, and went back to the client to discuss their needs in detail. It turned out that they simply needed to be reassured that the process would work, smoothly and quickly. Bringing together the right people from the client and supplier for a morning to walk through the process in detail would do just as well, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Once I had secured the client’s agreement it was straightforward to have the contract changed so that it reflected where they really wanted to end up, rather than stipulating a poorly understood route to that destination.

On many other occasions I have been stuck with a contract that could not be changed and where it was mandatory for testers to comply with milestones and deliverables that had minimal relevance to the real problem, but which required such obsessive attention that they detracted from the real work.

Software testing standards encourage that sort of goal displacement; management attention is directed not at the work, but at a dubious abstract representation of the work. Their attention is directed to the map, and they lose sight of the territory.

We can do better

Sure, no-one has to be a sucker. No-one has to buy the snake oil of standards, but caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is the legal fallback of the huckster. It is hardly a motto to inspire. Testers can do better than that.

What is the answer? Unfortunately blogs like this preach largely to the converted. The argument against standards is accepted within the Context Driven School. The challenge is to take that argument out into the corporations who are instinctively more comfortable, or complacent, with standards than with a more flexible and thoughtful approach.

I tried to challenge that complacency in my EuroSTAR tutorial, “Questioning auditors questioning testing”. I demonstrated exactly why and how software testing standards are largely irrelevant to the needs of the worldwide Institute of Internal Auditors and also the Information Systems Audit and Control Association. I also explained how more thoughtful and effective testing, as promoted by the Context Driven School, can be consistent with the level of professionalism, accountability and evidence that auditors require.

If we can spread the message that testing can be better and cheaper then corporations might start to discourage the lawyers from writing damaging contracts. They might shy away from the consultancies offering standards driven processes.

Perhaps that will require more than blogs, articles and impassioned conference speeches. Do we need a counterpart to testing standards, an anti-standard perhaps? That would entail a clearly documented explanation of the links between good testing practices and governance models.

An alternative would have to demonstrate how good testing can be accountable from the perspective of auditors, rather than merely asserting it. It would also be directed not just at testers, but also at auditors to persuade them that testing is an area where they should be proactively involved, trying to force improvements. The testers who work for consultancies that profit from standards will never come on board. The auditors might.

But whatever form such an initiative might take it must not be called a standard, anything but that!

Edit. A petition has been set up in August 2014 to calling for ISO to withdraw ISO 29119 on the ground that it lacks the consensus that its own rules requires. Consensus is defined in ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004 as follows.

“Consensus: General agreement, characterized by the absence of sustained opposition to substantial issues by any important part of the concerned interests and by a process that involves seeking to take into account the views of all parties concerned and to reconcile any conflicting arguments.”

The petition argues, correctly, that there is no consensus. Further, the process did not seek to take into account the views of all parties concerned. The standard reflects one particular view of how testing should be conducted and marginalises those who disagree. If governments and companies insist that ISO 29119 should be adopted, and that suppliers should comply, this will have a dramatic, and damaging, effect on testing and our careers.

I urge all testers to sign the petition.