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The History of Context-Driven Testing
Developed by Joris Meerts
1600's
1605 Critical thinking (Bacon) In his treatise The Proficience and Advancement of Learning the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon paves the way for advancement in scientific knowledge. He stresses the importance of empirical study.
1930's
1934 Falsifiability (Popper) In the book The Logic of Scientfic Discovery - published in 1934 in German as Logik der Forschung and in 1959 in English - the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper discusses the philiosophy of scientific experimentation. According to Popper a theory can only be considered scientific if an experiment can be conducted that can falsify the theory.
1937 General systems theory (Von Bertalanffy) In 1937 the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy starts teaching general systems theory.
1950's
1956 Satisfice (Simon) In the article Rational choice and the structure of the environment Herbert Simon coins te term satifice. Simon suggests that organisms adapt well enough to satisfice but do not generally optimize.
1957 Heuristics (Simon) In his book Models of Man the American sociologist Herbert Alexander Simon introduces the concept of bounded rationality; the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have. Simon suggests the use of heuristics.
1960's
1960 Confirmation bias (Wason) The term confirmation bias is coined by the British psychologist Peter Wason in an experiment publishedi n 1960.
1962 Paradigm shift (Kuhn) In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn introduces the paradigm shift as a driver for scientific revolutions. According to Kuhn a paradigm shift occurs when a current paradigm contains anomalies that require a new basic set of underlying assumptions.
1967 Lateral thinking (De Bono) In his book The Use of Lateral Thinking the Maltese-British thinker Edward de Bono coins the term 'lateral thinking'. He introduces the term as a concept next to critical thinking. Lateral thinking - sideways thinking - is intended to incite ideas that are free from previously locked assumptions.
Grounded theory (Glaser, Strauss) In their book The Discovery of Grounded Theory sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss introduce the grounded theory methodology. The methodology, used in qualitative research, is a systematic generation of theory from data that contains both inductive and deductive thinking.
1970's
1974 Cognitive bias (Tversky, Kahneman) In their article Judgment under Uncertainty Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduce the concept of the cognitive bias.
1980's
1989 Naturalistic decision making
The History of Context-Driven Testing
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