And that door leads to Sarah's office. Sarah! Now it comes down! She came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students.". This is a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig
When I was 15 ( way too many years ago ) I was looking through my older brothers books finding something to read and I saw one with the title "Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance".
As I was starting to get interested in motorbikes I took it and started to read only to find it wasn't really about motorbikes at all, it was all about something called Quality and philosophy and someone who went insane and went on a motorbike journey with his son. I didn't really understand the book at all but there was just something about it...
I kept it with me and have read it again several more times over the years, still a long way from understanding it but that something still grabs me. Then I got my interest in testing and started reading some testing books and found that several of the books made reference to it.
Did reading the book all those years ago plant a seed crystal of quality seeking in me that is only now just starting to bloom that I'm moving into testing and QA ?
Or is it something that's always been in me and that was the something that connected me with the book and now with the job role as well ?
Can I teach Quality to the developers here ?
I've started re-reading the book again and now I am reading it with a testers/QA mindset and already I can relate parts of the book to ideas I am having so look forward to further parts of this exploration later in my blog | 