There is more what it seems

On December 30th 2009 I already wrote I was reading the book from Oliver Sacks: "The man who mistook his wife for a hat: and other clinical tales" The fun of this book is the short stories and from every story you can learn.

For example: A story is called: "The President's speech." It is about a group of people who listening to the speech of the president and start laughing. Those people were living on a aphasia-section of a hospital. It seems that when the symptoms are very strong they are lesser able to understand the meaning of words. In this story they are also explaining that there is more then words in verbal and non-verbal behaviour. There are also the so called "Klangenfarben". Perhaps in English this can be translated to "Colour of sounds". There were people who were affected by every word the president told and convinced in the honesty. Others who had any lack of feeling received the words as they were spoken without context and interpretation.

This story made me think that if this behaviour is human, we all have some kind of thinking. We will be coloured sometimes and sometimes we are able to listen only to the words. I can imagine that it depends if we are interested or not. Imagine if this behaviour is affecting the judgement of the requirements we are reading, hearing and/or writing. What about the test cases we have written. Think what impact it can have if we approach the testing process from a neurological point of view. As we are working with humans, we have to spend time to get known to each other. We might have to learn how we can learn from each other.

Imagine that we are able to write down our requirements and scripts. And we are automating them. How wrong we can be if the written information is coloured in such a way were we didn't pay attention towards the "Klangenfarben"?

As said before, to understand more from testing, also look beyond the borders of the process.