Testing and Music: Parallels in Practice, Skills, and Learning

For years, people have appealed to engineering as the dominant metaphor for how software testing should be done. Yet there are many other metaphors that could provide value to learning about patterns and principles in software testing. As professional testers and non-professional musicians, we observe that music affords such a metaphor. What are the parallels between music and testing—especially exploratory approaches to testing? What can we learn from the similarities?