Assumptions are the mother of all … successes.

A list of questions to ask, by Michal Bolton, prompted me to write about assumptions. Most of these ideas come from doing the ‘dropping a calculator’ exercise with James Bach.

Why do we need to make assumptions ?

Asking questions is very good, but in some cases we can not get the answers. There could be different reasons :

• There is no-one to ask from – assignment arrived in mail.
• The client does not know the answers.
• The client is busy and will answer in few days (hopefully)
• Etc.

Now, as we all know, making reckless assumptions is bad, but in order to not to waste valuable time, we should start testing right away. But how to avoid the problems with false assumptions? After all, even if we do get answers, some of those are ambiguous, some false, and some questions we forget to ask. Thus we cannot escape making assumptions.