It's the little efficiencies that get you good

Wow, it's been a while since i posted.   I won't make excuses...other than that since the last time I did post the wife and i have been dealing with the birth and first weeks of our new child.   Ok, i guess i will make one excuse.

Today was reading this article about Kaizen implemented adhoc in the real world and it made me realize that I have in fact been lazy my entire life.  Ok, to be fair, I could be called a lazy person by a lot of people and I wouldn't really have any defense against them.  I do appreciate my time on the sofa a little too much, it is true.  But this is not the lazy to which I am referring, or in a way perhaps I am.

I have never believed for any task that there wouldn't be a better way to build the mousetrap.  I have expended hours and hours in my life on more interesting make-work projects to somehow convert the original task to a more palatable, easy, comfortable or convenient effort.  I can't actually support a claim that throughout my life that I have have necessarily saved a lot of time/money/effort but i can at least claim that i have tried.  I don't think that i've ever tried to put forth that this desire to find the easier, more efficient, sometimes better way wasn't driven primary by lazy but hey, we all have our own motivators don't we?

Lazy is a term that kind of has more negative connotations than it needs to have in our society.  Lazy might mean that you do a shoddy job because you're too lazy to do it right, it might also mean that you never get your butt off the couch to do the job at all.  But lazy might also mean that you require yourself to have an appropriate end result but that you get there through a path that is smarter, easier, better.

When you think of lazy that way, Kaizen is lazy being good for business.  For this type of lazy is generally good for business.  Finding a shorter path to the same result almost always saves time, effort, manpower and obviously money.   At the personal level what kaizen, as i'm now choosing to call my lazy pursuit of better, does for me is two fold.  In the initial attempt at the task i am more interested and involved because finding the better way is in and of itself additional challenge.  But in future iterations of the task, it's an easier task to accomplish and therefore more likely to be done properly. Not to mention, any change in process from the first iteration will obviously need tweaking through the future attempts.

Kaizen, my lifelong friend, you provide justification for my laziness and for now that's ok.

Mr Fails

Stumbled across the Cartoon Tester blog the other day.  This guy does some pretty amusing cartoons that are exceedingly topical for software testing.

He wrote this little book/pdf for understanding the plight of the tester career and it's pretty bang on.
you can take a look at it from here: