I have been reading a bit in the book “Exploring science”. Where David Klahr explains how science works, which is also a lot about how the essence of testing works.
In his book he explains about SDDS – Scientific discovery as dual search. Which means that science is about searching the hypothesis space as well as the experiment space.
To be an effective scientist, he explains, that first one should focus on searching the hypothesis space and then experiment to see what is correct. There should be balance, but according to research early in the book, it seems that “theorists” that has more hypothesises are more effective than “experimenters” which focus on constructing more experiments to gain information, but doesn’t always have a hypothesis for the experiment.
If I relate this to testing, I would think that it is important to have a lot of hypothesises of what could go wrong, before testing a lot, and constructing checks with hypothesises in mind. Then verify they were not true, or if they were true, report them/it as bug/s.
Therefore the RST-definition of testing makes a lot of sense to me “Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing, exploring, and experimenting, which includes to some degree: questioning, study, modeling, observation, inference, etc.”
The learning part is central, so that it is possible to come up with many hypothesis of what could go wrong.
Looking forward to finish reading the book.
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