1. Sweat the semantics
2. Explore ideas
3. Stay humble

James is one of the founders of Linguamatics, the world leader in innovative natural language-based text mining. Over the years he's had many roles in the company and is currently the test manager, a position in which he strives to provide an environment where his testers have an opportunity to do their best work. He’s on Twitter as @qahiccupps and blogs at Hiccupps (http://qahiccupps.blogspot.co.uk).

My name is James Thomas, and I’m a semanticoholic.

Elisabeth Hendrickson’s book, Explore It!, contains this definition: “Tested = Checked + Explored”. When I read it, I was fascinated. “What does that mean?”, I asked myself, “what does it /really/ mean?”

This talk will describe the journey I undertook to understand it, and other definitions of testing that I found along the way, and then to come up with a new definition that filled the gaps I saw in the others, without losing the aspects of them that I felt were valid and useful.

Essentially, I formalised what testing is for me. And, now that I have my definition, I can ask myself in any given situation whether my actions are consistent with the way I believe I want to behave.

This session is one of three stories presented by three different people in a storytelling track.