An article on beauty, quality and relativity

Today, Stickyminds and Techwell published my article “On Beauty, Quality and Relativity”:

• http://www.stickyminds.com/s.asp?F=S17281_COL_2
• http://test.techwell.com/articles/weekly/beauty-quality-and-relativity

The article is based on a lightning talk I did at the Danish Alliance night at Eurostar 2010, and describes my thoughts after seeing the Joshua Bell video below (story in the article).

For those to whom the prospect of reading a 1200 word article sounds daunting (or for those of you who love executive summaries), here is a TL;DR:

• Passers-by in subway don’t recognize sheer beauty because of incongruent context
• This applies to testing as well: our ability to evaluate quality depends on feelings, expectations, words and distractions
• To properly assess beauty/quality, viewing/testing conditions need to be optimal

<Service announcement: I will be presenting at StarEast on a slightly related topic: the links between the arts and testing. If you are there too, let’s chat!>