I recently got a book from my sister-in-law, my wife's family comes from Taiwan and they are Buddhist so I occasionally end up going with them to the Buddhist temple and meet some of the monks there. One I have had the pleasure or meeting, and discussing things with, is the Venerable Yifa, a very smart, funny person and prolific writer. More can be found out about her here Yifa, I'm also pretty happy to know someone with their own wikipedia entry, pretty cool.
In reading Authenticity: Clearing the Junk, which focuses more on the junk cluttering our lives, I inevitably had to start working on something for test plans and started thinking - do I have junk here? Is there stuff that is cluttering up my testing and making my work harder and more difficult than it needs to be? While I can be prolific when I want to be, I can also feel that I don't want to waste time on something because its a point or discussion I feel can be done in a relatively short amount of time, my test plans are not padded in any way. I don't write more than I have to, probably from advanced laziness where I don't want to have to update any more than I have to in the future if things change, but also because I know things may change in the future so why get set into something that may not be the same in 6 months?
So if my test plans don't have much junk in them what about those test cases? I took a look and one of the benefits of using Excel is that you only have a limited amount of space to write in, so I am actually boxed in to be junk free there. Not a bad way to leave myself. So I decided to look at the Test Harness we use, and yes, lots of junk there. Not all mine, but I certainly contributed at some point. So I need to clean that up.
But why stop there? If I look at my calendar I have a lot of meetings, some of them go far longer than they should, do I contribute junk there? Probably. I better start cleaning that up. Of course sooner or later I am going to get back to looking at my life and seeing how much junk I have there as well, there have been cuts in many things over the past year just to provide a healthy home for my son. No soda in the house anymore, I do miss that, not as many cookies and snacks, I eat way more fruit than I used to, and baking our own bread has been nice and gives the place a rustic, homey feel.
I guess I've been keeping an eye on this stuff for awhile now, so I guess I am going to a good place in life, and work.
Those Buddhists, pretty smart.
