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.”

When I worked with James Bach on a Satisfice project he would ask me uncomfortable questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it. He’d ask, “Tell me what this bug is at its core.” I’d say, “When I click this button, I get an error message instead of the dialog I’m expecting.”

“Why do you expect a dialog?”

“Because that’s how the app is supposed to work.”

“How do you know?”

“It worked that way another time.”

“Ahh, so there is an inconsistency between how it worked before and the way it works now. What is different? How do you know that they are not both right?”

OK, so you have relaxed, you have found your feet, you stand straight up. How do you move? You can learn a lot about how you move by watching other people move and walk around. Notice where their movement originate in their bodies, and how the impulse flows through them. Some people lead with their head, like they are on stilts and constantly trying to catch up with their noggin. Some people lead with their shoulders, hunched up, or defensive. Some people lead with their knees and shins, banging into things. Some lead with their chest, puffed up and top heavy. T’ai chi practice is to initiate all movement in the center of gravity, called the t’an tien. The masters were not fooling around when they said “all movement” – all physical movement, breath, emotion, thought, everything was moderated by the t’an tien. In fact all sensory intake is channeled to the t’an tien, where it is processed into life energy and initiates our reactions.

Taoist philosophy links heaven above with earth below via the upright human. Since tai chi is the embodiment of Taoism (at least in part – Professor cheng Man-Ching said that his tai chi was 30% Lao Tzu (Taoist) and 70% Confucius (Confucianism)), the principle is interpreted very literally. The spine is said to link heaven and earth, so one carries oneself as though the top of the head were suspended from above on a string, and the sacrum was attached to a thousand-pound weight. The spine itself has separation between the joints, is not kinked or bent sideways (though the natural front to back curves remain), and offers the most space in the torso for the organs to function. The image is a string of pearls suspended from above. It maintains its shape as it moves through space, the pearls do not lean on one another, and it can move freely in any direction according to any force applied to it, and returns to the straight form after the force is gone.

When we are physically straight, our limbs are free to move in any direction and manner, so we can respond in any way necessary. Our lungs have maximum capacity for best functioning, and all our organs have space to move around and get a healthful little massage as you go through the day. When I lean over with hands in pockets, I may look cool (or not!), but I have a lot of work to do to get back into position to respond to my environment. And I have lost my connection to the earth – see the post on single-weightedness.

In testing, straightness comes into play when we enter a test open to any possibility of system behavior. If I have the feeling of straightness, I can deploy resources as soon as they are needed, whether it is tools or data or asking help from my professional contacts. If I test with purpose, committing the full weight of my intellect to the test, I am straight, not leaning over and nonchalalantly testing with my psyche half-engaged.

With straightness, I can link the micro activities of testing with the macro activities of model building and contextualization: by maintaining my connection to the ground/yin (my mission and models) and heaven/yang (the details of day to day testing). This is embodied physically by using the lower body to connect to the ground and control your own body’s position in space, while using the hands and arms to connect to your partner in practice, listening to their balance and transmitting the force of your movements. They can’t work together without straightness.

The notion of straightness has a lot of connotations in English, one of which is “integrity”. Great testing requires integrity of thought and action, and also integrity of reporting. Practicing physical straightness helps me get the feeling of mental and ethical straighness as well so I can tell when I’m not really flexible, really engaged, really forthright, and stop leaning over, take my hands out of my pockets, look the app in the eye, and engage.

In tai chi, as a martial art and as a healing art, the source of power is the ground. Our connection to the ground through our feet is the foundation of everything that we do, so severing that connection is (almost) always a bad thing. That is why there are so few jumps in the tai chi form, and why when we practice together the goal is to cause your partner’s feet to leave the ground. The principle of yin and yang says that one foot must be the dominant connection to the ground. There is no such thing as equal connection to the earth through both feet simultaneously. That’s as sensible as saying the moon has two dark sides or two lighted sides. Equal weight means no connection at all, and this is very dangerous, so we strive to maintain single-weightedness, and when shifting weight, to minimize the time we spend at or near 50 / 50 weight distribution.

So the foot that has 51% through 100% of the load of the body is the weighted foot, and it is the foot on which we focus our attention to connect with the power of the ground. The other foot is free to do other things – step, kick, sweep, whatever – but it is empty, and should not distract us from the central concern which is to connect to the earth through the weighted foot.

In testing we very often need to tap into the power of the ground, the power of thoroughly knowing the territory we are in, so our tests are grounded in valid, factually correct system models, exploring a particular coverage area, with oracles that we understand – or if we don’t understand them, we understand the schema of them and can identify the holes we are trying to fill. We need to work to solve one problem at a time, which leads us to control the variables in our tests and vary them systematically. We need to have a leg to stand on, which in testing terms means we need to have a reason for testing where we are, a risk model and theory of error that locates our testing in high-value space.

Most of all, though, what I bring to testing from training in single-weightedness is the feeling of committing to the problem. All of my attention and effort is going into understanding this exact spot in the app, and grounding myself in the problem space so that when I have to tell the quality story, it comes all the way up from the ground, not just from the top of my head.