Software Testing knowledge management

Today, I like to discuss about software testing with some interesting perspective.

That is Knowledge Management. I should say this idea came from one of James Bach's lecture. He did not explain it but I kind of did my own research and came up with this. One paper that was interesting was this. (Tacit knowledge vs. Explicit knowledge)

I'm not going to explain details about Tacit knowledge and Explicit knowledge here but it's pretty short paper so you can read them all within 10-15 mins.

Here are some common arguments that I hear from other testers.
"You should document all your work (test plan, detailed test case steps, and etc.) because if you hit by a car one day, we loose all the work you've done!"
"You should document all your work because next person who will take over can easily start his/her work"

If you read the paper that I linked, you can definitely say that comments above is related to explicit knowledge management. I'm not sure if those are the examples of Explicit knowledge management.

Paper clearly mentioned pros and cons of each knowledge management and conclude that we need to find best possible hybrid(tacit + explicit) knowledge management. And I agree with that

So, let's break down some software testing work and analyze them by perspectives of proper tacit or explicit knowledge. Let's not consider of process (waterfall, v-model, w-model or agile) for this.

• Understand project requirements
• Review and test spec (generated by PM)
• Review and test dev design (generated by Dev)
• Come up with test strategy
• Create test plan
• Generate test cases
• Manual test execution
• Design test automation
• Test automation implementation and execution
• Report bugs
• Debugging, investigation and trouble shooting
• Time management (deadline)
• Learn and use supporting tools (testing related)

Think about the list for a moment. Which ones would you put tacit knowledge management and which one would you put in explicit knowledge management?

Or which knowledge management bucket contains more? I would say tacit knowledge management.

I would say that for software testing, tacit knowledge management is greatly more influential than explicit knowledge management because every projects are different and individual tester's ability is the key factor of success of testing work. I'm sure there are some cases where explicit knowledge can help but I think that is far less influential compared to tacit knowledge.

Going back to the argument of "hit by a car" and "taking over the work". How much do my documentations help next person's testing work? Next person's testing work is mostly defined by his/her ability/view of testing.

It's kind of hard to conclude something at this moment. I need to chew on this thought a little further. Let me think about it and I'll come back to this thought.