Labels as inpediments to testing

Reading James Bach's post about labels for test techniques was a big relief. I find talking about what testing terms mean to be very limiting and frustrating. Very few "common" terms exist in testing and this makes it hard to talk amongst ourselves about what we do.

Names aren't bad, and they do facilitate discussion. Like them or hate them, programming patterns at least make it easy to have a conversation about common structures. Of course, this says nothing of people faking knowledge of the pattern under discussion. That is another post.

Establishing what terms mean for your team is a necessary first step. I'm going through this right now and so far, we have a lot of similar shared past experience and there is a lot of overlap and we haven't run into any serious misunderstandings or had any heated debates.

I second the recommendation of Gerald Weinberg's book. I need to read it again as a refresher on these topics.