I finally got around to watching James’ Competitive Swashbooking video. Aside from being envious of the view from Pirate HQ, one of the things I picked up on was the repeat mention of anchors. I could have sworn it was used more often, but upon re-viewing it gets used only twice.

Jon uses the term in two ways: anchoring mission and anchoring paradigm.

So what is an anchor? I’m not sure if the Bach brothers have an ‘official’ definition, but I suspect it is a macro variation of the consistency heuristic we use in testing. Specifically, it is a thing or idea which all other things or ideas swing around.

When I was in highschool I took all the fine arts credits I could (something like 20% of my diploma consists of them), and part of the final year class all your work is towards creating a portfolio that had a theme. For example, the mini-portfolio that was done the first couple weeks of class was ‘trees’.

Like James in the competition, I just jumped in and worried about the theme later. Eventually I turned in my portfolio with the theme of ‘Things Adam thinks are cool’. Nice and broad, but also tied things together.

To keep with the nautical theme, you don’t need to have an anchor when embarking on a journey, but you need one by the time you need to stop the boat. James had his anchor airlifted to him (or perhaps he pillaged it from a passing ship), whereas Jon had acquired his before even leaving the wharf.

Some unanswered questions remain though after watching the video.

  • What was Oliver’s anchor for his judging? There certainly appeared to be some logic and pattern to his questions
  • Did Lenore have the same assessment of the presentations? Since some of the books came from her library, she is married to one of the contestants and is mother of the judge, she is not an un-invested stakeholder.
  • Did either James or Jon re-evaluate their anchors, and how their books were related to it after having to discuss and explain their findings?

So what is the take away from this other than an interesting way to spend a day if you have a huge amount of books available to you? I think it is this:

When doing any testing, you need to know your mission (why are you doing this testing) and your oracles (how do you recognize a problem). But before you can determine that, you need to know your anchor(s). And these are by necessity big, as in organization level. Google’s would likely be ‘organize the world’s information’ and ‘do no evil’. Everything falls out of there. But your individual anchors also have sway too, these are often called ethics.

Do you know the anchors that affect you and your testing?

Oh, and as an aside, when I started thinking about this I went along the lines of guidelines for number of anchors on a ship and their placement and deployment. I didn’t find that specifically, but the wikipedia article on anchors was pretty interesting nonetheless.