The man who doubted a computer's addition ability...

In the early age of computers, when I was growing up, one of my uncles decided to install a computer in his existing small business. He took some basic computer courses on emails, word editors, spreadsheets etc. and started using the computer in his daily operations.

In no time, he started seeing the benefits of a computer over papers and slowly became an expert in spreadsheets. He often used to teach me and my cousins the basics of computer. We named him 'computer uncle' and used to hide from him whenever he was around to avoid those sessions.

One day, after a few years, when I was visiting him, I saw him working in front of his favorite computer. There was a big excel worksheet, full of numbers, open in the computer screen and he was doing some calculations using those numbers with his pocket calculator!

Surprised, I asked him, "Do you know that you can do the same calculation using the excel formulas? You won't have to enter the numbers all over again in your calculator." He calmly replied, "Yes, I know that. But I don't trust excel!"

I didn't know what to say!!! He continued, "We should not trust machines for these types of human work. They might be fast, but they are inaccurate."

A couple of decades went by. In the mean time I started working in software industry and gained some experience in software testing. Now I sometimes feel that most of us are still like my computer uncle. We still believe that some processes are still very human and they couldn't and shouldn't be automated because that will produce inaccurate results.

I and my friend, Palash, recently created Testing Algorithms to try to make a difference in the requirement analysis and test design process, which is still believed to be a human process. Our website is www.testingalgorithms.com.

P. S. When I called computer uncle a few months back to inform about Testing Algorithms, he was in the middle of a chess game with his computer.