It’s easy to go into our imagination and wonder what it would look like to upset someone by being a dick about terminology, and imagine the damage we’re doing.
Let’s assume that we’re the sort of person to seriously question our terminology; to go deeper and thrash out the hidden meaning in our words. Let’s assume that we know the faults of terms like “automation”, but are socially permissive to avoid upsetting people or being seen to suppress a whole idea by taking issue with a part of it (even though we support the strength of the idea by finding its… bugs).
Here’s where I am so frequently reminded of Orwell’s great novel on totalitarianism, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The party-ruled state was just beginning to introduce “newspeak” - a language based grammatically on English but with a limited vocabulary. English was professed to be too decadent - that much of it was unnecessary - and therefore we can simply reduce the words available to us to express ourselves… but “newspeak” was created (and eventually enforced) not to streamline English but to suppress that expression. Humans think in language, so to limit language is to limit free thought. To change language is to change world-view. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the political party wanted to deliberately limit the expression of the “proles” to reduce dissent and to force the world-view of that party onto the working class. The mechanism still works by accident, though. We can reinforce and spread memes (in the original Richard Dawkins sense of ideas spread in a pseudo-genetic way, the catchier and oft-told ones surviving) about something through the way we choose to speak about it and what we fail to illuminate about the words of others. The news media is always under such intense scrutiny about terms like “alleged” and “terrorist” and “murder” and “so-called Islamic state” because we care intensely what ideas are spread… what ideologies are fed, and which are starved. We use peer review to shred bad ideas in science - the process of ruthlessly attacking people’s ideas… not because we hate people being wrong but because we are in the service of good ideas.
In words like “automation” this happens by an accident - a cruel twist of testing’s dark history. Doctors have abandoned old Galenic words like “humours” and we stuck with “automation”. There’s good reasons behind that, probably the QWERTY keyboard problem and a big sack of money with “test tool” written on it are somewhere in there. A good “automater” knows that they are doing tool-assisted testing (or aiding it) - but there are a myriad of business people who are trying to do what’s best for their business under the world-view limited, twisted and controlled by a term like “automated testing”. Why not call poison “food” if we all know it’s poison? Because someone will get confused and eat it, and I cannot find any way to blame them. The idea that testing can be automated plays its part in the lack of respect we give to testers and testing, dehumanising what we do and cheapening the craft. It gets people - good people who aren’t in love with writing dull and repetitive code - fired, and seriously restricts their hiring opportunities. It drags years of painful, extensive effort to improve the industry backwards. It plays its part in very real-world consequences, and those consequences stretch further than an awkward conversation or hurt feelings - further than my lifetime, off into the future as we stumble awkwardly towards less ignorance. I don’t want a system to flourish that fights too hard in the other direction.
So I think we should have all that in mind when we evaluate our goals in that context.
I think to make any honest steps towards solving this problem we should concentrate on better ways to safely challenge bad ideas - when, where and how to do it instead of suspiciously refusing to do it. Where to change a word and where to tease out new tacit meaning of the old one. When to give someone the floor, and when to initiate a Q and A. How to phrase a challenge as a helpful clarification instead of an attack. With whom this works and with whom it does not. And when our Evil Politicians come out, even when they’re wearing their masks. What we must never, ever do is adopt the stance that damaging ideas are okay, or are automatically insignificant in comparison to some people’s feelings. If I were forced to choose I’d rather encourage progressive craftspeople who really dig into the inner workings of language and philosophy into the industry than people who need to be always right to be happy or who are consistently obtuse in defence of contentment, hiding ignorance instead of acknowledging it. Luckily I totally don’t have to choose, nor do I have to assume anyone is only one of these things, although, knowing all of this, I do have to take responsibility for what damage I do - to individual people, to groups of people, and to the entire industry. This weighs heavy on my thoughts - more than most, probably. It took me out of the community for a while.
Good news, though, we’re testers. We are (if we’re any good) critical thinking professional skeptics who have to deliver bad news with tact and, with that bad news in our hands, prove ourselves to be fighting on the side of the recipient. So if anyone can do it I think we can.
Edit: Call poison food, not call food poison.