And you are here why?

A friend of mine has a restaurant in the East Village ( Grape & Grain  — you should go!). It’s a small thing, seating maybe two dozen people. The fascinating part is how the chef — Adam Rule — generates consistently great dishes despite his “kitchen” consisting of 3 induction plates and a convection oven, all tucked into a corner. I’ve seen him operating when • A group books the entire restaurant for dinner, and pre-selects the menu (“ Could you serve everyone clams for starters, then pasta, the sea-bass, and pavlova for dessert? ” • There are never more than a dozen or so in the restaurant, but as one couple leaves another shows up. This from 6pm to midnight • A dozen people suddenly show up, and proceed to order  everything  off the menu. And in all these cases, the food always shows up like clockwork, the entire party gets their pasta at the same time, newcomers don’t sit around waiting, etc. You get the point, the service is exactly what you would expect at...

If you’re doing any form of  Continuous Testing  (or heck, even just automating your tests), you’ve probably already run into the  Semantics Gap , where what  you  mean by XXX isn’t what  others  mean by it. This can be quite the killer, in ways both subtle and gross. I recall a post-mortem in the past that boiled down to the QA and Release teams having different assumptions about what “ The Smoke-tests passed ” meant. The resulting chaos — both between the teams, and for the customer — was  epic , and something that still makes me shudder reflexively when I look back at it  . And that, my friends, is just about when I put together the following terminology. Mind you, far be it for me to tell you to adopt this terminology. Heck, you may very well vehemently disagree with it — and that’s ok. The thing is, whatever terminology you use needs to be agreed upon by everybody! (And, you’ve probably got all the same stuff below, just broken ...