{"id":197,"date":"2010-09-13T16:59:53","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T23:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2010-09-13T17:00:53","modified_gmt":"2010-09-14T00:00:53","slug":"dichotomy-for-dummies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/dichotomy-for-dummies\/","title":{"rendered":"Dichotomy for Dummies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are many clear examples of dichotomy (mutually exclusive or contradictory categories) in the world. A light switch is on or off. A gun may have fired, or not fired. A software program is running, or it is not running. But many things we deal with are not dichotomous, but continuous. A person can be happy or sad\u2026or somewhere in between. The temperature outside may be cool or hot\u2026or somewhere in between. Indeed, some things in the world are black and white, but others definitely have multiple shades of grey separating the two concepts.<\/p>\n<p>Differentiating between dichotomous and continuous variables is (IMO) one of the basics of critical thinking \u2013 which is probably why I\u2019m annoyed when people in software look for dichotomy where it doesn\u2019t exist. For years, Agile proponents have denounced anything non-Agile as Waterfall (I\u2019m not even completely convinced those two terms are on opposite ends of the same continuum). Software testing, I\u2019m afraid, has had it\u2019s share of dichotomy misdiagnosis in the past, but does seem to be improving as the profession matures.<\/p>\n<p>Some key examples include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Exploratory vs. Scripted. While it\u2019s certainly possible to be entirely exploratory or entirely scripted in your test approach, grey areas between the two exist often in the testing world. I suppose you could say that if a test script contains exploratory elements that it\u2019s really just ET, but see my example on Agile vs.Waterfall above for my reason why I disagree.<\/li>\n<li>Automated vs. Manual. It takes <a href=\"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=193\" target=\"_blank\">a lot of effort<\/a> to have a fully automated test \u2013 most \u201cautomated\u201d testing has some amount of \u201cmanual-ness\u201d to it. The same can be said for manual testing. When I\u2019m testing \u201cwith my hands\u201d, I almost always use tools to help me. Registry and process monitors, macro recorders, and debuggers are all tools that (automatically) help me test better. The short story is, that there\u2019s a really blurry line that fills the gap between automated and manual testing<\/li>\n<li>SDET vs. STE. Guess what \u2013 very few SDETs write tools and automation all day, and a lot of STEs I know write plenty of code (once upon a time, I wrote IIS server extensions to help with some test scenarios \u2013 my title at the time: SDET). I realize that these terms are Microsoft-ish, but although the <em>titles<\/em> are dichotomous, the <em>roles<\/em> are definitely continuous.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What other examples of misdiagnosed dichotomy have you seen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are many clear examples of dichotomy (mutually exclusive or contradictory categories) in the world. A light switch is on or off. A gun may have fired, or not fired. A software program is running, or it is not running. But many things we deal with are not dichotomous, but continuous. A person can be&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}