No matter how well we know each other, our words sometimes come off different than our intentions. Because communication is as much saying and meaning as it is hearing and understanding.
Observing text of people like those who are Taking testing! Seriously?!? and noting the emphasis they put on words leaves me thinking that no matter how carefully they choose their words, I will always read every sentence with three different intentions because I can control it, they can't. Words aren't protected by definitions, but they are open to the audience interpretation.
I am thinking of this because today online I was again corrected. I should not say "manual testing", the kind of poor quality testing work that I describe is not testing, it's checking. And I wonder, again, why smart people in testing end up believing that correcting the words of majority leads to them getting the difference between poor quality and good quality testing, and factors leading up to it.
A lot of client representative I meet also correct me. They tell me the thing I do isn't testing, it's quality assurance. Arguing over words does not matter, the meaning that drives the actions matters.
Over my career I have been worried about my choice of words. I have had managers I need to warn ahead of time that someone, someday will take offense and escalate, even out of proportion. I have relied on remembering things like in 'nothing changes if no one gets mad' (in Finnish: mikään ei muutu jos kukaan ei suutu - a lovely wordplay). Speaking your mind can stir a reaction that silence avoids. But the things I care for are too important to me to avoid the risk of conflict.
I have come to learn this: words are trap. You can think about them so much you are paralyzed from taking action. You can correct them in others so much that the others don't want to work with you. Pay attention to be behaviors, results, and impacts. Sometimes the same words from you don't work, but from your colleague they do.
We should pay attention more to listening, maybe listening deeper than the words, for that connection. And telling people that testing is QA or that testing is checking really don't move the world to a place where people get testing or are Taking testing... Seriously.
