Don't be dogmatic about dogma

A colleague of mine recently passed around a reference to "The Way of Testivus" from Agitar, and as promised on the front page I did indeed find that it was filled with "good advice on developer and unit testing" [although personally I haven't found testing my developers to be so useful :-)]. But there was one page that I thought would be dangerous in the wrong hands, and it started like this....

Don’t get stuck on unit testing dogma

Dogma says:
“Do this.
Do only this.
Do it only this way.
And do it because I tell you.”

Dogma is infl exible.
Testing needs fl exibility.

Dogma kills creativity.
Testing needs creativity.

I've got a good grasp of what the author means, and I agree with the sentiment quite strongly. But I'm also confident that out there somewhere is someone new to automated testing who's saying "oh, I've seen how other people do testing, and how could they have gotten it so wrong? I'm going to do things completely differently - I'm going to be creative". The trouble with rejecting dogma is that "dogma" is often a great approach to 80% of the problem, and it often contains a great deal of wisdom that isn't obvious to a newcomer.

I'm all in favour of rejecting dogma, but only after you've understood why those ideas might have become dogma in the first place, and you're confident that you understand the reasons that particular dogma doesn't apply in your specific context. Otherwise you're just being dogmatic about rejecting dogma.