Freedom to use words rant

I was a writer long, long before I was a tester. And that taught me that not everyone uses words as carefully as I do. So Iā€™ve long since stopped being critical of othersā€™ use of language. If I get their meaning, then thatā€™s fine. If I donā€™t, Iā€™ll politely ask for clarification. Iā€™ll only be critical if Iā€™m being asked to actually proof-read a document thatā€™s going to be released into the Real World, and even then thatā€™ll be criticism of the text, not the person.

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I didnā€™t know about that hypothesis, but it turns out I semi-understood it in the form of linguistic relativity. I didnā€™t know about Arrival, either, so Iā€™ll try to get around to watching it!

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That sounds like a pretty good definition of testers and what it is that testers do anyway!

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I think the testing profession suffers from a bit of an inferiority complex and occasionally labours some definitions a little too far.

Bug/Defect/Failure/Error/Mistake? Communicate clearly and coherently, and the definitions donā€™t matter so much. At the same time, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the definitions. If every cat in the herd adhered to them, the world would probably be an ever so slightly better place.

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