Introduction

I was a core member of what Farrell would call a collaborative circle: the four people who codified Context-Driven Testing. That makes me think I can supplement Farrell's account with what it feels like to be inside a circle. I try to be "actionable", not just some guy writing a memoir.

My topics are: what the context-driven circle was reacting against; the nature of the reaction and the resulting shared vision; how geographically-distributed circles work (including the first-wave feminist Ultras and the Freud/Fleiss collaboration); two meeting formats you may want to copy; why I value shared techniques over shared vision; how circles develop a shared tone and stereotyped reactions, not just a shared vision; and, the nature of “going public” with the vision.

Mentioned

• Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.
• Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Quoc Nguyen, Testing Computer Software, 1993.
• Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), 1863.
• context-driven-testing.com (including the principles of context-driven testing), 2001?
• Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2002.
• Association for Software Testing.
• Elisabeth Hendrickson, Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, 2012.
• Jonathan Bach, "Session-Based Test Management", 2000.
• Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain, 1972. (It's the second in a series that begins with Master and Commander.)

Four articles that demonstrate personal style:

• James Bach, “Enough About Process, What We Need Are Heroes”, IEEE Software, March 1995.
• Brian Marick, "New Models for Test Development", 1999.
• Bret Pettichord, "Testers and Developers Think Differently", 2000.
• James Bach, "Explaining Testing to THEM", 2001.

Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing and related:

• Cem Kaner, "Improving the Maintainability of Automated Test Suites", 1997. (This contains the conclusions of LAWST 1 as an appendix.)
• The LAWST Handbook (1999) and LAWST Format (1997?) describe the meeting format.
• The "Pattern Writers' Workshop" style is most fully explained in Richard P. Gabriel, Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (2002). James Coplien, "A Pattern Language for Writer's Workshops" (1997), describes writers' workshops in the "Alexandrian style" of pattern description (the one used in the seminal A Pattern Language). "Writers Workshop Guidelines" is a terse description.

Image credit

The image is the painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.