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The CREATE Framework: Bringing Context to Complexity

Elisabeth Hendrickson

CAST 2026 · August 3–5, 2026

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About the session

The Association of Software Testing is explicitly Context-Driven. It’s right there in the mission statement: “The Association for Software Testing is dedicated to advancing the understanding of the science and practice of software testing according to Context-Driven principles.” Bret Pettichord coined the term in his seminal 2003 presentation “Four Schools of Software Testing.” But what exactly IS context? In the book Signals & Levers, Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi offer a definition: “context” is a shorthand term for the cumulative effect of all past decisions. All of them. Foundational decisions like what business the company is in and what clients it serves. Compromises or tradeoffs made to get to this point. External decisions like regulatory requirements. Current policy or process decisions. It all adds up, and the context is constantly shifting. The book introduces the CREATE framework—capacity, risk, execution, adaptability, trust, and economics—as a way to compare and contrast contexts. This is important because software development is an adaptive system. You poke the system, and the system pokes back. The context shifts and the system changes, often in unpredictable ways. You can’t reason about it with linear cause-effect thinking. These days AI is reshaping everything about how technology organizations operate. Chances are, your system is being poked hard. You need a concrete way to describe your context and discuss the implications in order to navigate this change. In this talk, Elisabeth demonstrates how to reason about context through the lens of systems thinking. In doing so, she highlights the role that all of us play in shaping the systems in which we live.

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