I had never heard of the book until Studs Terkel died.
It was about six weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The coverage of his death chronicled his life’s work, including his book of voices from the Great Depression, first published in 1970. An analyst drew a parallel to the uncertainty we were entering.
So I went looking for it.
One idea turns up in that book more than once, as I remember it, and one telling of it stayed with me. I can’t give you the exact words. I’ve looked for the passage and couldn’t find it. So it goes something like this…
A little girl during the Depression. A hobo comes to the house. Her mother is generous with people in his position, as generous as limited means allow. He explains how he ended up where he is, and there’s some anger in it, or so I read it.
After he leaves, the girl asks her mother whether what he said was true.
Her mother says it was true from his point of view.
The girl carried that sentence long enough to hand it to Terkel on tape. I’ve carried it since.
I can’t vouch for the wording. I can vouch for the sentence.
That was 2008. On October 16, I relearned it, in a comment thread, over a quote I found in an old file box.
It was an SD Times from June 2019. A quote box stopped me cold. Theresa Lanowitz, saying that once Mercury Interactive went under, no vendor stood up for testers as a valuable part of the software engineering process.
Technically, Mercury didn’t go under. They were acquired by HP. But her point struck me as dead on, and I think I know why it struck me so hard.
I spent years at Empirix, one of Mercury’s competitors. We were rivals in the marketplace, but we stood on the same side of the industry, selling tools and making the case for the people who used them.
Mercury dominated that marketplace. They were the biggest, the loudest, and the most capable, and they had the megaphone. The rest of us could whisper and nudge, but we never had the platform.
That was the landscape I knew… the booths, the conferences, the user groups, the messaging. From where I stood, outside the companies we served, selling goods rather than services, the products and the stories around them were what drove the advocacy. Mercury was the proof. They advocated fiercely for the tester’s seat at the engineering table, flaws and all.
So I wrote it up the way I saw it. When Mercury disappeared, nobody picked up the megaphone.
The rest of us weren’t in a position to pick it up, because we were disappearing too. An industry-wide wave of consolidation swept up Mercury, Empirix, Segue, Compuware, and others. What had once been companies built around testing became product lines inside much larger organizations. Testing went from being a company’s whole reason for existing to a line on someone else’s price list.
The megaphone was gone. And one by one, so were the whispers.
That was my truth. It was true from where I stood.
Then Theresa Lanowitz showed up in the comments.
She did more than agree. She sharpened the point. The Mercury tools never went away, she said. The spirit of what the company stood for did… a company that put customers first, backed its partners, and gave testing professionals a voice. In a B2B market, she noted, that kind of commitment is rare.
Then she said something I hadn’t thought to say. She sees a lot of similarities between testing and cybersecurity, where she works now. The difference is that security made a case for itself and “has a CISO as an executive sponsor.” Testing, she said, had few companies with a C-level executive advocating for it.
And she voted Yes. Testers still need a seat at the table.
I had been looking at the vendor. She was looking at the org chart.
That was the part I hadn’t seen. From where she stood, looking back at testing through the lens of cybersecurity, the question was different: who sits at the table when the decisions get made?
I wrote back that this was the exact analogy I’d been missing. I meant it.
The mother’s answer comes back to me here. My view of Mercury was true from where I stood. Hers was true from where she stood. Neither of us was wrong, and it took her stepping outside, and me listening, to see the shape of the whole thing.
So who is testing’s CISO?
I don’t think the answer is a vendor, and I suspect that’s the quiet lesson of the Mercury years. A vendor can lend a craft its voice. It can’t give a craft a seat. And as the consolidation showed, a vendor’s voice lasts only as long as the vendor’s strategy does.
Security got its seat, as I read it, by changing what it talked about. It stopped describing itself as a technical activity and started describing itself as protection against systemic, existential business risk. That language earns an executive sponsor, and an executive sponsor earns a permanent place at the table, all the way up to the board.
Testing, too often, went the other way. It got pushed down into tactical delivery and treated as a cost center, or a bottleneck on a release schedule. Nobody takes a bottleneck to the board.
Now the ground is moving again. Autonomous tooling and generative models are producing code faster than anyone has seen. Deploying a system nobody has verified brings enterprise risk in just as fast as deploying insecure code does. That’s the Verification Tax, the line item that never appears on an executive dashboard until an outage forces the issue, coming due at machine speed.
Without someone at the executive level demanding rigorous verification, the belief that AI removes the need for practitioners could turn out to be a very expensive lesson for some organizations. That’s my read, and I hold it loosely.
Which brings me back to the doorstep.
A hobo at a mother’s door was one person telling one version of the truth, and a mother had one sentence to keep the moment honest. A feed is that doorstep multiplied a thousand times, and almost nobody gets the mother’s sentence. Worse, more of what arrives now is true from nowhere. Generated text has no standpoint to check, no history, nothing at stake.
The comment thread was the opposite. A named person, with a history and a stake, stood somewhere I couldn’t and told me what the view was like from there. I could check her. I could answer her. The sentence did its work again, nearly a century after a girl first heard it.
It reached me through an obituary, a book, a girl’s memory, and a mother’s answer. Every hand on that chain had a name. That may be how this kind of truth still travels best.
That same Friday, I posted a joke job listing under that thread. Advocate for the Software Tester. Must be completely unfunded. I thought I was kidding. The seat may have a different name than I thought, and the listing may need a sponsor more than an advocate.
My verdict, for now, and offered for debate: testing may not need a louder megaphone. It may need a seat, and someone senior enough to sit in it.
That’s true from where I stand. I’d like to hear what’s true from where you stand.
I would love to hear from you… rick@qameditations.com