Our cat Midnight who passed away last March was a delight to live with. He had a love of licking walls and sometimes electric outlets! His tail even looked like a question mark and he defined curiosity. We hypothesized that his head was full of fur and that's why he acted so insane.

This weekend our friends came to visit including their toddler who is soon to be 3 years old. He is adorable and has completed his teething. He has boundless energy, curiosity and enthusiasm! He is new to owning teeth and randomly bites stuff. His father's head. His own tongue to the point it was bleeding badly. His Mom even when sitting on her lap. He is unable to resist touching and licking anything dangerous at all and in bizarre and creative ways seems to seek his own demise. He is relentless in his pursuit of strange plots that no one could predict. At one point he chewed up some carrots and dropped them into the cat water. Not on purpose, just playing around. He's relentlessly exploring the limits of what he can do, what he can learn, and the world around him. He's also inexplicably drawn towards the dangerous and forbidden. His Mom told me that she needs to start him skydiving early because he's either going to be an extreme sportsman or a sociopath. He might make a great security tester as well! I got wondering if we could somehow capture the spirit of exploration and relentless curiosity and sheer unpredictability of a toddler during the exploration part of testing sometimes what we might learn.

What if we could tap into this power of exuberant peril and enthusiastic discovery to improve software? We build up this idea of rules and safety, but really, despite behavior that seems crazy to us on the surface, toddlers are learning so much! I'm not suggesting we have a meltdown of tears or lose our strategic thinking, but there is something about that curiosity that I think could be usefully applied to software testing.