Cynefin & software testing

A few days ago I produced a minor tirade about people forgetting the fifth domain of Cynefin and trying to create things to fit into chaos. My point then was that disorder (the fifth domain) and chaos are transitionary domains, not categories. Given that it was good to come across this blog post on the use of Cynefin in software testing. Firstly its good to know that the model is being , even better to see a student pick up the essence despite only a couple of minutes teaching. The post has a nice set of illustrations and contains the critical observation that in most cases we start by thinking we are dealing with a complicated system but end up realising that most human issues are complex in nature. The post then goes n to identify different testing practices by the three categorisation domains and resists the temptation to place things in chaos.

Now I am picking up on the whole software field (design as well as testing) for a conference in the US next year so this is great input. I’ve added the blog to my RSS feed and will look to see how this authors ideas develop.