During this trip I had about 4 hours a day to drive so I decided to listen to Discussion of The Method by Billy Vaughan Koen during the commute. It’s basically about engineering what it is philosophically.
“The engineering method is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources.”
– Billy Vaughan Koen, Discussion of The Method
It outlines the heuristic-based reasoning used by engineers and generalizes it to a universal method for problem-solving. I was thinking about this book and how it relates to QA testing. The skill in engineering is applying the heuristics not just following a list of ‘things to do’ uncritically (as testing is sometime seen as and perhaps why some people think it can just be automated away).
Other highlights of the book are a pretty exhaustive list of heuristics and a last chapter which describes his ‘Eutopia’ (meaning ‘good place’) for how he would use the method as a program for change. His view/heuristic is that we should train people who are skilled in in a variety of subjects since engineering challenges are increasingly systemic and there is a call for systemic perspectives.
No longer will the graduate nuclear engineer be considered an educated person, certified to decide questions concerning nuclear energy generation on behalf of society, or endorsed to design and build nuclear reactors if he is not familiar with ecology, value philosophy, and human psychology. No longer will the graduate liberal arts student be considered liberally educated, certified to select our artistic and literary heritage, and endorsed as a guardian of our humanity if he cannot explain what an engineer means by a trade-off, an optimum, and the state of the art.
– Billy Vaughan Koen, Discussion of The Method (pg 242)
Overall I’d recommend this read and the resources below which are connected to his argument.
Other relevant resources:
Esa Saarinen, Raimo P. Hämäläinen,Mikko Martela and Jukka Luoma via Helsinki University of Technology
Systems Analysis LaboratoryDownload
*Tacit and Explicit Knowledge by HARRY COLLINS
