This is something I've discussed with colleagues quite a bit over the last couple of months and I think it's interesting. When you're trying to grow a testing team in a culture that doesn't fully understand what testers do, which is probably every culture in all fairness, being able to have an agreed understanding of your purpose and methodologies as a discipline is really useful. Obviously, agreeing on things is easier to do when you're all agreed on your vocabulary. This feels to me to be not all that controversial.
However sometimes certain terms can acquire a bad reputation if a team has had a bad experience of them. I know this first hand from seeing how people who've had unproductive encounters with 'BDD' react when you start using some of the associated words. As a result I worked in a team where we'd frequently have 'Kick-off' meetings for a ticket. This would be a process involving multiple disciplines who would sit down and discuss a ticket before we worked on it, collaboratively adding some Acceptance Criteria to the ticket, discussing what and how we'd develop and test a feature. There were frequently some front end automation tests created and some regression tests to add to a pack that could be used as a kind of documentation of what the feature now did.
It doesn't take a genius to see that although we had very actively dropped the terms '3 Amigos' and 'Scenarios' we were still doing a large chunk of the core elements of a software development practice which a large section of the team had discarded as a disaster. Had this team salvaged the working parts out of a wreckage of a previous practice left burning in the ditch? Or were they basically repainting the car and driving around in it, strongly proclaiming that their previous vehicle had driven itself into a tree and they had nothing to do with why it had crashed and no interest in fixing it (ignoring the fact that they were still using it?)
Today I was watching Atypical on Netflix, and at one point the father goes to a support group for parents of kids with autism. He doesn't regularly go to the sessions and therefore gets corrected multiple times for using words in a way the rest of the group sees as unacceptable. They have all obviously agreed on a ubiquitous language over time and the way he was talking about his life and family was deemed to be offensive and lacking enlightenment. Basically he was just trying to help his family and understand his place but he was being judged because he didn't understand how this closed group were using language. The problem he has is that they have grown sensitive to certain words and are unable to see though his phrasing to the intent of what he's saying and so the conversation becomes unproductive.
Is this a problem we have? I certainly know how much the phrase Quality Assurance makes me want to launch into a lecture on how I reject that label. Do we need to be careful about discounting people as 'not our kind of tester' just because they haven't become like linguistical clones of us?
The more I thought about this the more I realised that what's important is to give people the opportunity to explain what they mean. Scratch beneath whatever buzz words people are or aren't using and you may have more meaningful discussions. Yes, it's a bit more work but it's worth it because communication is not aways as universal as we think and not everyone understands the strict lexicon your tightknit group has formed. Whether that is a development team, a testing department in a company or a local test community.
So yes, they are only words. And words are all we have. Use them carefully but forgivingly at they same time.
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