Why are we forgetting to grow?

My colleague was joking yesterday that he wished to consider " whats your favorite testing book?" as one of his future interview questions. If he is gonna ask this during telephone interview, I am pretty much confident that many people will fail the interview. when I was reading a blog, I came to know that the same question raised by Copeland during an interviewing process, and uniformly the reply was " I never read a book on software testing". These are the people claimed to be professional software testers. It was not surprising me because there are testers I know personally who never opened a software testing book in their life. There are testers with professional stamps who do not know even the simple day to day test jargons.

Few days back, I was chatting with one of my friend, who calls himself as a test guru. I innocently asked him to tell me some of the key pillars of formal testing? The next minute, he got diarrhea and vanished from the yahoo messenger.

Lee Copeland pointed this beautifully in a conference. Let me put his own words.

" A physics student knows who Newton is. a person in biology business knows who Darwin is. But, tell me how many of us know who Dave Gelperin is? Who Thomas McCabe is? Who Michael Fagan is? These are the grandfathers of software testing". But most of us, do not know them. This not only concerned Lee, but also concerns me.

Let me ask the same question "How can we call ourselves as professional testers if we are ignorant of our own history? " Why do we resist to grow our knowledge? This makes us to be seen as some of the lowest forms of life in the software world. we ourselves do have to believe that testing is a valid specialty in software development and try to grow.