General Systems Thinking

I've always had a knack for taking what I learn in some subject area, generalizing it, and applying it to another area. I never really thought about it and it came in extremely useful when I embarked on a testing career. In my testing career, I was easily able to take my developed expertise in the software under test and apply it whenever I moved onto another project with new software to come up to speed on. I thought everyone did this and it was just how people think and learn.

Then James Bach introduced me to "An Introduction to General System Thinking" by Gerald M. Weinberg. Reading this book was a revelation. Suddenly I was able to put a name to what I had been doing (albeit with limited capability).

At the core of General Systems Thinking is modeling of systems. It suggests that everything around us in the world and everything that we learn can be represented as a model – strip out the details that are unique to that model and now you have a model that will help you get up to speed quickly in another area. Gerry Weinberg does a far better job at explaining this!

I believe it's a vital element of exploratory testing. As you learn, you are building up a model of the software under test, and from that model you will take various routes through your exploratory testing session. You even build up models of testing over time, which model (or heuristic) you choose will depend on your exploratory testing session.

From a testing perspective, if you haven't read this book, I would highly recommend it. It will challenge you to improve how you approach a problem and how you test.

If you have any examples of how creating and applying a model in your testing has been effective, I'd love to hear about it.