Testing In Principle: Root

T’ai chi hurts to do. The benefits are enormous, and the cost is pain. The nice part is, the same deal applies to most things in life. If you want to be a great guitar player, your fingers will hurt. If you want to be a great athlete, your muscles will hurt. My teacher Chris Casey says, “There is no way out. But there is a way through.”

What hurts is letting go of the tension in my body and feeling that tension come into consciousness. When I work this while standing and imagining that I am connected with the earth through the soles of my feet, the pain is incredible in my feet and legs, the burn of chi blowing through parts of my body that I’ve denied it access to for many years. The gains of course are commensurate with the effort I put in. The key win while rooting is that I am connected to something much larger than myself, a thing to which everything and everyone else is connected as well: the earth. When I am participating consciously in that connection I have insight into the connections others have with the earth as well, and can analyze and manipulate it to my benefit in tai chi, and to their benefit too as a friend. The pain comes from losing the shell of ego I have built that separates me from my surroundings.

The testing parallel is obvious from my other blog entries: the bare facts of your context are the ground you stand on when choosing what to test and why. A great Rapid Tester does not arrive in a context already thinking she knows all she needs to know, fully formed, individuated and full of opinions about what is best. She learns. She crawls, then walks, then runs. Asks questions, appears clueless, and opens herself to learning about everything from everything. She molds herself into a teammate in order to be useful, takes on all the different viewpoints of the stakeholders, and also learns to “think like the code” (model the system) as well.

This is a painful process for those of us with egos that tell us to look like we have the answers. It is hard work to catalog my biases and weaknesses, and to systematically counteract them. One of the best methods for analyzing my tendencies is to participate in friendly competitions and debates with fellow testers. I learn that all of my favorite tricks have pitfalls, and there are a lot of great ways to test and manage testing that I have not yet thought of. I have become more comfortable with that fact. And I have become comfortable in my community, a vibrant and living aspect of my context that I am very happy to be able to tap when necessary.

One more point about Root. The tai chi player with more root always wins. That is because they can extend their root beneath their opponent and cut them off from the earth. A good player can literally bounce me like a basketball when they sink below me, test my connection to the earth, and find the flaws in it. We have the same job as testers, to probe the structure of our systems and the strength and depth of their logic and implementation, and to work on the flaws we see or suspect, until we break the illusion that the system “just works” and can bounce it around like a basketball. When I do good Rapid Testing, I am sinking deeply into the problem space, asking the hardest questions, getting at the heart of the matter, and feeling the burn.