A few thoughts to leave with

Gerald M. Weinberg used to come up with quick, easy, pithy sayings to remember the key points of his work. We may not be Jerry Weinberg, but we do recognize that a few of our ideas compress well into his format. We have collected a few of our favorites here:

• The consultant’s gambit: There are probably obvious problems insiders can’t see because of company culture that outsiders will see.
• The maxim of documented testing: At the end of every human-run, pre-designed, documented test is a hidden expected result: … and nothing else odd happens.
• The first corollary: This assumption is particularly difficult to automate.
• The second corollary: If you try to automate the search for the hidden expected result, you’ll get a whole lot of false errors.
• The maxim of test automation: Even if a test could be automated, the second time it runs, it fails to be test automation and becomes change detection.
• The exception...