Chapter 11 of 26

The right context can still be weighed wrong

Context anchoring is a name I came up with myself, from experience. I do not know if the concept exists anywhere else.

Clean context is not one thing but a series of things. Four acceptance criteria for one feature, the conditions it must meet to be accepted, are four pieces of context, and all four are correct.

Poisoning is a wrong fact that came in from outside. Anchoring is right facts with the wrong weights. Every context you gave is right, and the agent grabs one of them and puts so much weight on it that it acts as if it were the only one.

I get very frustrated with this. I give it the right context, and inside the right context it gets obsessed with one right thing. What I do now is tell it at launch: provide similar weight to the contexts I provide, and do not get obsessed with one.

Two test runs went wrong. In the first, every test uses a transfer limit nobody has used for a year. In the second, every test checks the one acceptance criterion you mentioned first, and the other three get nothing. Which one does cleaning the context fix?

Only the first. A limit nobody has used for a year is poison: a wrong fact got in, and taking it out fixes the run. The second run had nothing wrong in it. All four criteria were right, and all four were there. The agent anchored on the first one, and cleaning a context that is already clean changes nothing. Tell it to weigh the criteria equally, and before you accept the suite, count the tests for each criterion. Zero tests on three of the four is not a test suite.