In his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford makes the argument that the trades, the so-called blue collar occupations, have been intentionally sidelined and belittled by North American society. And we are worse for it. I picked it up at the bookstore on a whim since the cover had a motorcycle on it and had ‘craft’ in the title; two things I am currently interested in. While reading it I felt the familiar sense of deja-vu as it relates to the testing field right now and we think there is lots to be applied from the plight of electricians and plumbers in terms of our field.

A System of Rules

Testing is, at its heart, the application of a series of rules. True testers realize that this, but also know that the set of rules is ever changing based on a myriad of factors. Compare the professional tester’s mental process to that of a repairman using the following quotes from Chapter 1

  • The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine
  • Knowing what kind of problem you have on hand means knowing what features of the situation can be ignored
  • A realistic solution must include ad hoc constraints known only through practice
  • Creativity is knowing what to do when the rules run out or there are no rules in the first place

All of these illustrate the importance of practice, knowledge and desire to do the job effectively. To treat it as a Craftsman would any other task. Unfortunately the number of people who treat testing as a Craft is small, though vocal. The testing world is experiencing something similar to what highschool education did in the 90s with the elimination of shop classes in place of computer labs. What schools turn out now are people who know the ‘why’ of things rather than the ‘how’. Or as stated by the executive director of the California Agricultural Teachers’ Association

We have a generation of students that can answer questions on standardized tests, know factoids, but they can’t do anything

If we swap ‘testers’ for ‘students’ in that statement you have a very generalized view of what is happening in the Standardization and Certification camps. That’s great that you know the definition of a testing task, but do you know how to do it, when to do it, and more importantly, when not to do it?

The focus on standardization in the testing world is also partly the cause of the mass offshoring of testing in recent years. If a task can be broken into a series of finite, distinct rules, then the task is able to be delivered globally. Not only that, but according to MIT economist Frank Levy, there is a downward pressure on wages for jobs based on rules.

The way forward then is to treat Testing as Craft, to be delivered by people who take pride in the application of learned skill and knowledge and not as an assembly-line like task where the testers are easily replaceable cogs.

Old bikes don’t flatter you, they educate you

Crawford is by day a motorcycle repair person and is constantly confronted by new problems, scenarios and indeed contexts. He says quite clearly that “Old bikes don’t flatter you, they educate you” and then to show that discovery is not limited only to bike maintenance he quotes Iris Murdoch about learning a new language

My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me.

Software systems educate us daily, if not hourly as they reveal themselves to our inquiries. How effectively they educate us is largely dependent on how well we prepare ourselves for the eduction. Philosopher Albert Borgmann has the idea of Focal Practice which is the decided, regular and normally communal devotion to a focal thing.

Focal Practice has existed in pockets of the Testing Community for awhile though under many different names. Testing Games, Katas, Dojos and now the Weekend Testing events are all examples of Focal Practice. And seeking them out and participation in are signs of someone who wants to master the craft of testing.

A Series of Masters

In the trades, the accepted way of learning is to apprentice at the side of a Master. They offer a model to follow and pass along their accumulated knowledge. Crawford recounts his education as a ‘gearhead’ in his his teens and early twenties; all of which was informal and outside of the traditional school system. And was utterly important towards his education of the craft.

Now I saw it. Countless times since that day, a more experienced mechanic has pointed out to me something that was right in front of my face, but which I lacked the knowledge to see. It is an uncanny experience; the raw sensual data reaching my eye before and after are the same, but without the pertinent framework of meaning, the features in question are invisible. Once they have been pointed out, it seems impossible that I should not have seen them before.

The testing craft needs to develop more of these situations where the awareness lights turn on, never to turn off again. Not only through the treatment of testing as a craft, but through continued analysis of ourselves as it relates to the problem at hand. One of the big evolutions the Agile movement brought was the periodic reflection of how the process was working at a team level through retrospectives. Crawford speaks on the singular with metacognition which is thinking about your thinking. Or as he describes it

It is what you do when you top for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate.

Is my context [still] correct? Am I on mission? It is the mission I think I was on before?

Another important role of the Master is to allow for learning opportunities through safe failure. Failure is something that has been removed from modern learning. Especially education based on books and theoretical discussion than from hands-on doing. Would you want a plumber redoing your bathroom who has worked under someone with years of experience or who memorized a book and wrote a multiple choice test? Now think about whose hands your software is in.

Tacit Knowledge

So what makes someone a Master? I would think it has a large part to do with the accumulation ,and ability to recall, a substantial body of Tacit Knowledge. This is what Blink by Malcolm Gladwell focuses on and its inclusion in another work lends more credence to the idea.

Just as firefighters will often leave a building just before it collapses — not because it looks like it will collapse, but because it doesn’t look ‘normal’ based upon their years of experience, a Tester can find bugs not because they are obvious, but because something doesn’t look right on the screen in front of them.

Just having the tacit knowledge is not enough though. They have to be able, and willing, to pass along that knowledge which has to be done on a human-to-human basis as it is too complex to capture algorithmically.

‘Manual’ Testers

It is trendy to pour disdain on both people who practice manual testing and indeed the very notion of it much along the way the trade of plumbing has been dumbed down to the image of a slovenly character with their butt hanging out of the back of their ill fitting pants. The trades used to be something to aspire to and commanded respect, now they are the subject of jokes and ridicule. Is Testing destined to go down that same route? I hope not. But if it is to escape such a fate we need to stand up against bad testing education and practices and bring the pride and ethic to it that a Craftsman brings to their work.

Impressions of Shop Class as Soulcraft

This is not a testing book. Instead it is a reverent look at a way of life that is under attack in a systemic manner. Though sometimes preachy, if you are interested in reading about someone’s journey from being a kid who liked cars that went fast to someone who fixes motorcycles for a living and how that can relate to testing then this book is a nice quick read for you. I’m going to say now that it won’t be one of the most important books for testers of the year, but it opened my eyes to a couple new concepts and reinforced some others and for that it was well worth the money.