Marc Andreessen recent posted an article about his new company Ning which makes a free social networking platform. That got me thinking, is the software industry much like the fashion industry in that they endlessly recycle trends?

Take social networking (Facebook, Myspace, Linked-In, etc) for instance. People have been creating their own social networks for year, they just were not called such directly, first with email mailing lists, then usenet (or maybe I have those two backwards), then bulletin boards before the current social network as portal idea. I remember in the 98/99 timeframe we had an email ‘social network’ for a bunch of use that all went to raves (back when the term meant something). It had all the hallmarks of social network; needed an invite to join, pictures were stored centrally, meet-ups were coordinated, etc.

So back to QA / Testing. The ‘traditional’ way of testing is a risk / impact analysis and use that as a guide for all testing activities. Unfortunately, this method often relies too heavily on the magic behind the numbers used in the weighting. This has led to the rise of such things as the Context School of testing and greater use of exploratory testing techniques. But is risk analysis poised for a comback just like the hippie look returns every so often? It would not surprise me if formal risk methodologies gain favor, especially with management (and they are the ones who sign the cheques) as a result of the proposed changes for software contracts. It would also not surprise me if that favor corresponds to a opposite result for exploratory testing which is harder to quantify.

So the question is, is context based testing a ‘tie dye’ or ‘massive shoulder pads’ trend which come in and out of fashion with (near) clockwork regularity, or something as game changing as when Coco Chanel introduced her tortoise shell glasses for the first time?