Binary Oppositions

I am totally loving Oddly Influenced, Brian Marick's new podcast. The latest episoide covers ways in which schools of thought and practice can inhibit the cross-fertilisation of ideas.

It includes a case study in experimental physics from Peter Galison's book, Image and Logic, where two different approaches to the same particle analysis problem seem to run on separate, parallel tracks:

In the 'head to world' tradition, you use your head to carefully construct situations that allow the world to express its subtle truths ... In the 'world to head' tradition, you make yourself ever more sensitive to the world’s self-expressed truths ...

The first of these wants to theorise and then craft an experiment using statistics while the latter wants to gather data and try to understand it visually. Marick is pessimistic about the scope for crossover in this kind of situation:

How do you bridge traditions that differ on aesthetics, on different standards of what counts as a compelling argument, on how the world should be? You mostly can’t.

I see this kind of binary opposition all the time in software development, particularly around testing. Proceed bottom-up or top-down? Start with the code and reason about what will happen or start with the system and observe its behaviour? Research or dive in?

But this is an uninteresting dichotomy. Well, for my solo practice at least, because, as a self-identifying context-driven tester, I'm intentionally looking for productive ways to approach a problem while remaining aware of preferences, habits, and biases that might get in my way.

For example, I have a strong allergy to relying on the reading of code or configuration to make a claim about actual system behaviour. In this respect I'm tending towards world to head. On the other hand, I'll often view the code to understand something about the system before deciding what kind of experiment to run, and where, and how. This is more head to world.

I like to think that I cross these kinds of boundaries pragmatically to take advantage of whatever tools there are to help me accomplish my task. I do not feel constrained by some lore or aesthetics or philosophy about the right way to get the result. Except, as you read a moment ago, I seem happy to place myself firmly in the context-driven testing camp.

I find that dichotomy very interesting.
Image: Uncrate

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