I recently read Frank Herbert’s Dune and was surprised to find a couple passages on testing. I thought it would be fun to take them completely out of context (that’s a good habit for testers, right?) and try to apply them to software instead of spice. Here’s the first:
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
—Bene Gesserit proverb, from Frank Herbert’s Dune
This proverb appeared in one of the excerpts from in-universe books that open each chapter, all meant to have been written after the main events of the story and usually highlighting some important aspects of the plot or characters in the chapter to come.
To be honest, I’m not really sure what the relevance of this passage to the story was. It comes immediately before the chapter where Lady Jessica finds the greenhouse in their new home on Arrakis. In it, she finds a warning that there are double agents among them advancing a plot to overthrow the Duke. Maybe these initial clues at treachery are like the first steps on the road, or the first bit of the mountain. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
Is there any way we can say this proverb applies to software testing?
One interesting bit for us is the advice to “climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain.” My first thought was that it could be about how you can’t practically test everything completely, but it equally implies that you could climb the mountain or follow the road to its end (whereas you can’t test everything). This isn’t saying anything about what’s possible or not. I’d be inclined to say that it means we don’t need to climb the mountain—that we can tell it’s a mountain without going to the summit—except for the other half of the proverb:
From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
This isn’t as easy to recklessly apply to software. With the road, once you’ve gone to the end of it, it goes nowhere else. For the mountain, it sounds like the essence of the mountain is that it is this large thing towering above the landscape. It’s something that goes up. So you can’t appreciate its mountain-ness from the top. Does this apply to software? Do we lose something about the software by testing it to its end? It might work on something like scientific study—once you understand everything there’s no more science to do—but a piece of software doesn’t stop being useful just because we’ve already exercised everything it can do.
Alternatively, perhaps it means that you lose sight of what the mountain or the road are once you’re that far along them. When you’re fully immersed in something, when you’ve studied that software every way you can think of and think you understand it inside and out, you lose the ability to see it as a beginner or an outsider. As a tester, when you become an expert on a particular system, do you risk losing the ability to see the software for what it is? I don’t feel like that has ever happened to me, but it’s also the sort of thing that you wouldn’t notice happening. It is certainly true that the things I think to test on a product after two years are different from what I would test if I were seeing it for the first time. Hopefully it’s because I know more and have a better idea of where the risks are, but maybe not.
This would be where it would be helpful to understand what the passage actually meant in the context of the novel. Maybe there’s nothing here about testing at all even though it mentions how to test something. I’d love to hear other interpretations!
In a future post, when I don’t have a real testing topic for the week, I’ll post the second passage from the book that is quite the opposite: there’s no specific mention of testing but it will be quite familiar to how we test. (Update: part two is here.)
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