Good questions. Someone asked me the first one while I was at LCA.

To me, testing is automated, or at least scripted. Verification has to do with making sure that you’re “doing the right thing” and that what you’re trying to do for, and what you’re testing, is actually what you want to change. Verification also probably has more to do with people and policy, than automation and repeatability.

I imagine there may be a formal definition for this in QA or business process circles. If I come across it, I’ll note it here.

Regarding moving an organization along — yes, I have some experience with this. It’s really hard and thankless if you’re at the bottom or middle of the hierarchy. It gets much better when you have support from supervisors or the heads of companies. Or if you can do this just for yourself.

May of the suggestions I make are changes that you can apply to your own work incrementally. My best experiences when there’s a “culture of chaos” is to just control my own work and show others how calm I am when things break, and how things break less often for me.

Maybe I will write about that more soonish.

-selena

1) What is the boundary between testing and verification?

2) Do you have experiences moving an organization from a culture of “it’ll probably work/ we’ll deal with problems as they happen” to “you haven’t convinced me yet/ what if it doesn’t work”? That would make a good (though perhaps long) blog post.

Thanks also for expressing your discomfort and retreat at the beginning of the event – and for overcoming it.