The TOTE (Test, Operate, Test, Exit) problem solving model can be applied to DevOps concepts like TDD, exploratory testing, design processes, and analysis.
In 1960, George Miller, presented a model of problem solving which he called the T. O. T. E model:
The notion is that you loop around a [Test, Operate] * cycle and when your Test is complete, then you have done enough Operations and you can Exit. It was a model of problem solving, or decision making. I wrote about it a while back on the blog and in my NLP papers You can find George Miller’s book Plans and the Structure of Behavior on archive.org. He describes the TOTE model in that book.
At the time that I explored the TOTE model previously, I didn’ t make the connection that the arc from Operate -> Test was also a feedback process. In the TOTE model, the Test learns from Operate, which we can easily map on to Exploratory Testing:
We Exit when our time has finished or when we have covered our ideas or whatever other ‘exit’ criteria we started our testing with.
I’ ve also written a lot more code using TDD, and I know that my TDD process very often resembles a TOTE process:
Until our design is complete, or our review of our @Test and code can’ t come up with anything new, and we have compared it with our statement of intent, etc.
We could view this as a completely well-defined process of evaluation where at every ‘Test’ point we know exactly what we are deciding upon and use the pre-defined evaluation criteria. We could also view the Operate process as a learning process which feeds into the Test process and explains the cycle. Each time we ‘do’ something (operate) , we learn something which we feed into the Test process. I missed the learning process inherent in the Operate -> Test arc first time around. I won’ t do that again, and that makes TOTE an even better model for the type of work I do. A model worth investigating.
