Through answering a lot of questions on SearchSoftwareQuality.com, I've found that terms like integration testing, unit testing, system testing, and acceptance testing often get in the way of talking about testing. There are many of these terms, and they often mean different things to different people.

I suspect we use those labels in an attempt to do one (or more) of the following:

• imply chronological position within a phased life-cycle


• imply a set of common testing practices done within that phase (automation of unit tests, traceability back to requirements, client interviews and surveys, etc...)


• imply who is doing the testing (developers, testers, customers, etc...)


• imply some concept of what risks we might be looking for (a technical concern, how two parts interact, if we've implemented what the customer wants, etc...)


• imply some concepts of what areas of the application we are covering (code, interfaces, data, features, subsystems, etc...)


• imply some concept of what oracles we might use in our testing (asserts, specifications, competitor or past products, etc...)

I'm sure they imply other things as well. (Let me know if you think of some I missed. I'll add it to the list with attribution.)

The reason I think this is important is because while these labels can help, they can also hinder. The can confuse the issue we are talking about since each term comes with it's own baggage. Often, I find it easier to just talk about testing (oracles, coverage, risk, technique, etc...) as applied to specific problems then to talk in abstract labels we often apply to them.

I wonder if you've encountered the same issue?

I recently had to brush off my self-esteem toolkit, and I couldn't remember everything in it. I would normally turn to More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit for the details, but I never seem to be at home when I need to remember all of them. So, I figured I'd list them out here with some links.

The self-esteem toolkit comes from Virginia Satir. There's a good article describing it's elements here . The basic elements are:

• The golden key


• The detective hat


• The courage stick


• The wishing wand


• The wisdom box


• The yes-no medallion


• The heart

In More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit, Weinberg adds the following:

• The mirror


• The telescope


• The fish-eye lens


• The gyroscope


• The egg


• The carabiner


• The feather


• The hourglass


• The oxygen mask

He describes them all ever-so-briefly here . The mirror, telescope, and fish-eye lens all have to do with Satir's congruence model (self, other, context) which Rick Brenner shows some applications of here .