A couple of years ago I attended a conference of the Association for Software Testing. It was a new organization and I  was curious about it, also the conference was local and a friend of mine was presenting there. I remember leaving with a sense of disappointment. I let my membership lapse after a year, but stayed on their mailing list just to see what it would evolve into. Recently I dropped off that too.

Somewhere along the line, the AST has posted on their web site that they are not only about improving the software testing profession, but specifically they are now also about promoting the set of ideas known as context-driven testing. At the core of this set of ideas is a reasonable and fairly obvious one: testers do what we can with whatever we have to work with. But also attached is an idea I find unreasonable: that there are no best practices in software testing, and never can be, because context is all. What works at one company will not work at another, there is no "best" that can be defined across the different industries where software and systems are deployed. "Best" is local, in other words whatever your boss says it is today.

I do not support this concept at all. I find it defeatist and depressing. It amounts to not only an admission of powerlessness but a celebration of it. In this view, testers are no more than servants of their present employer, who is to be viewed as a given, fixed, not to be changed, because that would imply a standard against which to drive change.

In fact, a business consists of human beings with whom testers have many common interests. Also, businesses operate in a larger context which includes other industries, humanity as a whole, the planet on which we all evolved. Employers are sometimes the first to recognize that they do not have all the answers, and may look outside their own company and even outside their industry for expertise.

I agree that the processes used in testing a spacecraft would fail if rammed down the throat of an internet company unused to such rigor. But that hardly means that someone with spacecraft experience has nothing to offer in that context. Or vice versa. Witness the rockets being built these days, surprisingly well, by former Internet billionaires. In any case, ramming, or what the article calls "context imperialism" is not the only choice.

It is possible to take more of a "Tao" approach. Accept your employer and co-workers for who they are, and exert what influence you can, overcoming resistance gradually through erosion, while learning from them and from the results of your efforts to move toward "better" together over time. The fun part is when your co-workers start moving in the direction to which you have been pointing all along, on their own, and faster than you could have hoped. I have seen it happen.

In some cases, the employer will not be open to learning from you. I have seen that too. Then personal context comes into play. How desperately do I need this job? If their way of doing "quality" so far outside my comfort zone it is affecting my personal life? Will I be able to endure the discomfort long enough to effect change in either the employer or myself? Do I want to become the person they are trying to change me into? These are tough questions, and every tester has the right to ask them, and to find their own answers.

My point is, there is a wider context for the software testing professional to consider than their employer, there is a professional context, a humanity context, as well as a personal one. The wise tester needs to be aware of all of these.