Remembering only what is in front of us is not really memory. Those who remember Beizer's insights worked in a world where AJAX didn’t exist, those who webspeak without trouble missed a lot of foundational thinking and wisdom. Our knowledge, it seems, isn’t collective, it’s situational.
When I mentioned Boris Beizer and the pesticide paradox in my last post, how many of you had to look it up? And those who did know about it, how's your AJAX skills? Be honest.there are folks with both a historical perspective and modern skills but they are far too rare. The second type of memory problem is industry amnesia. The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.
Quick, tell me about the last major failure of your teams’ product? Does your team have a collective memory of common bugs? Do you share good tests? If one person writes a test that verifies some functionality does everyone else know this so they can spend their time testing elsewhere? Do problems that break automation get documented so the painstaking analysis to fix them doesn’t have to be repeated? Does the team know what each other is doing so that their testing overlaps as little as possible? Is this accomplished organically with dashboards and ongoing communication or are the only sync points work-stopping, time-wasting meetings? Answer honestly. The longer the Enterprise crews' memory, the better their execution. The point is that as a team we build on our collective knowledge and success. I'm not advocating a diary for test teams, but I do want a mechanism for knowledge retention. A diary that documents its crews’ adventures and that can be consulted for details that might help them out of some current jam. The star ship Enterprise keeps a ship's log. Every project is not a fresh start, it's only a new target for what is now a more experienced team. It’s time we developed a collective memory that will help us to stop repeating our mistakes.
We have team amnesia that causes us to forget our prior projects, our prior bugs, tests, failures and so forth. There are two types of amnesia that plague software testers.
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