A lack of standard (testing) terms hurts us all

Disclaimer: This post is not an attempt at any linguistic gatekeeping or saying that anyone’s preferred word usage is wrong. It’s about how a lack of standards makes testing as an industry harder for everyone.

Testing is full of terms that are poorly defined, or have multiple definitions (like smoke testing for example). These different definitions are usually due to people having different context, or where they learn the term from. This leads to testing language being pretty wide and open, with the words we use having a lack of technical precision or commonly understood meaning.

So what? Why does that matter?

A lack of standard terms makes it harder to talk about testing, both within the testing community and when talking about testing to others. Here’s some examples that I’ve been thinking about where having standard testing terminology would be useful.

Hiring

Hiring managers use their own context and language to describe things, which sometimes means it’s hard to know what a role needs or is asking for. Both parties may be talking at cross purposes for what a “tester” role means and what activities and responsibilities are needed. This becomes more important when there’s potentially thousands of people applying for roles online (or we’re using AI to hunt for people with the skills we need) as context gets lost and we get the wrong people applying.

It’s the same with looking at CVs, the skills and details you put there may be mistranslated by the person reading them. You did manual testing for this role, but what does that mean? Did you follow scripts, explore the system and how deep was your testing… did it include reviews of the code? In a world where we need short and snappy CVs we don’t have the word count or space to devote to complex and detailed explanations of what we mean, so may get overlooked unfairly.

Starting in a new team

When we join a team (or new company) it’s already really hard to onboard; you have to learn all the new people, their ways of working and where the toilets are. At least we totally know everything about testing, right? It’s our specialism after all!

But then you realise that people are using terms that don’t mean what you think they do and it gets even harder to onboard!

The cognitive overhead of having to translate a glossary of terms that you should know, but other people are using differently, makes life harder. You either have to learn and take on their terms or maybe educate others on what you mean by things. There might even be assumptions that you make about what people mean leading you to doing the wrong thing – HEIGHTENING THE POTENTIAL FOR IMPOSTER SYNDROME TO CREEP IN!

The reverse is also true, having to onboard someone when you use a different language to describe things makes it harder and provides a less smooth experience.

Getting other engineers to understand testing

One of the ways we can get better testing in our organisations is to bring others on the journey: talking to developers, designers and product people about testing. This allows them to see what’s possible and support the different testing we need for holistic quality standards on a modern product team. But a lack of standard terminology for testing can make this outreach harder:

People online gatekeeping terms and arguing about things makes it hard for other engineers to follow what we mean. Plus it also RUINS OUR CREDIBILITY AS A PROFESSION – why would other engineers trust us when we can’t align amongst ourselves? Testing isn’t the only ones having this problem, many other areas of engineering have the same problem; but given we can be seen as outsiders to development we can sometimes have further to go in our outreach for it to be taken seriously.

Constantly changing testing terms may mean people feel they don’t understand something they’ve previously learned. Making people feel like they’re “not getting it” is a sure way to get people to stop engaging. This isn’t related just to teaching about testing hypothetically, we can risk people stopping engaging with the testing we’re doing in teams when working with them.

During teaching / Coaching

As with the above, a lack of standards in terminology just makes teaching people a little bit harder. Having a difference of opinions on what a term means can derail your coaching and make you focus on using your time to define something that wasn’t part of the training.

An example from my experience is that a team spent an hour talking around the difference between a risk (hasn’t happened yet) and an issue (has happened) because one person had a different opinion. Nobody really learnt anything, nobody changed their mind on things and the team wasted an hour not getting to the actual training that was needed.

As we talked about above, a difference in terminology can cause a lack of trust in your teacher through reduced credibility. If somebody uses a term that you don’t agree with the use of then you’re more likely to disengage and not trust their expertise in the subject. This can lessen the effectiveness of training and coaching in one on one, group and conference settings.

Talking to other testers

“Go run a smoke test for me.” If I asked this, it’s likely that I’ll probably get a different level of testing with a different outcome from different testers. To ensure I get what I need I’d probably have to explain further and clarity much further.

The same goes for when we’re having a chat online or at a conference, sometimes we talk at cross purposes and can inadvertently upset each other or end up in a fight that didn’t need to happen.

Both of these things can lead to a lack of feeling you belong in the industry and heightens people’s imposter syndrome. Feeling like you’re not on top of how others are talking about testing concepts leaves people feeling left behind and excluded from the community. This has the knock on effect of creating community bubble / echo chambers of testers that can only speak amongst themselves which isn’t ideal.

Okay so what? What do we do?

In the short term there’s probably not a lot that we can do. Training providers have a really vested interest in teaching you their special and unique terminologies to keep you coming back to them. Plus, there are industries that take a long time to pick up on new terminologies (don’t expect banking to change their terminology any time soon).

But there are small things that we can do as individuals that may help things / stop hurting us so much:

Stop gatekeeping

One of the easiest things we can do is just accept that people might have different terms to us and that so long as we generally understand things, maybe we don’t need to correct them. if people are using a term in a way that you wouldn’t online, do we have to have a big debate about it?

Stopping the in fighting can help reduce imposter syndrome and make us look like more trusted advisors to other engineers.

Provide a glossary

Assume that people might use different terms to you and be prepared to provide a glossary of your meaning somewhere (on your slides, on a wiki page, on your blog…). That will help people to consume your content in a way that’s more meaningful to them and improve the understandability of your work.

Outreach on the basics

Keep sharing information across the testing and engineering community! The more useful teaching content we have out there, the more that people will understand what we mean 9and that some things are synonyms based on different contexts). Having lots of different outreach materials that cater for different people means that people have options for what they pick to learn from based on what makes sense to them.

I also advocate for making that outreach transparent and easily accessible, we need good and varied content that isn’t all hidden behind pay walls! Hiding the good stuff away means that we cant progress so well as an industry.

Don’t sweat it so much

Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good. Maybe people don’t use the right terms sometimes and maybe that’s hurting us as an industry / profession. But does that really matter for your day to day test work? Probably not… so maybe it just doesn’t matter.

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