The Dog Age Paradigm

It's a well-known fact that I am the proud parent of the world's handsomest dog. Diego and I have our birthdays a mere 10 days apart which inevitably leads to the "dog years" discussion. While I'm chronologically ten times older than he, in "dog years" I'm only about 1/2 older -- that is, if you subscribe to the notion of "dog years".

The average lifespan of dogs varies from breed to breed but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 years. Since humans live on average about 80 years, we can say that dogs age about seven times faster than humans. Thus, while Diego has now completed three trips around the sun, he's actually 21 in dog years.

I think this model is silly and here are just a few examples of why:

1. Dogs can walk within weeks of birth (not even three months in dog years)
2. They reach adolescence well before a year (not even seven in dog years)
3. They're full grown well before being two (not even fourteen in dog years)

I do have a point in all of this, actually several:

1. Are there things in your project and/or testing that you just blindly accept as true even though they make no sense if you actually think about them?
2. One can prove anything with numbers.
3. Do you have processes that are overly simplified [or complicated] such that the intent gets lost?

I'd like to emphasize point one a little bit more. It's very easy for us to get stuck in a certain line of thinking about anything. Perhaps there's a developer that was plagued with delivering a series of bad code and now you think he's a terrible developer. Maybe some requirements weren't very clear and now the client wants something different than what was constructed but you think your solution is the best. Context-driven testing is God's gift to software testers. Test automation is the bane of mankind.

I'm not trying to suggest in any of those scenarios that opinion was formed haphazardly. Rather, I'm suggesting to not ever stop questioning anything, including your own conclusions. Things change as time goes on and context changes. I suppose the dog years "formula" came about as a way of explaining to children why pets don't live as long as humans. What might be acceptable in explaining a concept to a 5-year-old doesn't work for a 30-year-old.

Alternatively, the death of a family pet could be the "right time" to start teaching kids algebra. If we have to have a formula, I think this one works much better:

x equals the age in dog years and y equals the age in human years.