There has been some fluff and rumor around context-driven testing yesterday. Some folks even talked about the death of context-driven testing. Most of it was issued by the about page from Cem Kaner. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead, read it now, I will wait here.

Back? Alright. Now, I would like to take a pick on what context-driven testing means to me, and why I think the whole schools concept can help us shape something. These are the rough ideas I had around a proposal for CAST 2012 which was not accepted. It is based on the combination of the schools concept with complexity thinking and the CDE-model. Oh, you don’t know that one? I will introduce it.

Here is the abstract that I submitted:

Title: Significant Differences and Transforming Exchanges
In this workshops participants will apply three different concepts from complexity thinking to the schools of software testing model. The three different concepts – containers, differences, and transformational exchanges – will be explained in the workshop. We will directly apply complexity thinking to the schools of testing, and discuss where we see the schools help to shape different containers, what the significant differences between the schools are, and how transformational exchanges between the different schools could happen, and maybe where they will even fail.

Armed with these tools, we will discuss how to evolve our craft of software testing, eventually extending the the concept of the different schools of thought, and find platforms for transforming software testing for the 21st century.