Inspiration vs. Perspiration
Thomas Edison once said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I think software testing follows a similar rule where 99% of the time, testing is tedious and boring while we relish that 1% of the time where we relish the finding of a P1 bug or complete a troublesome bit of automation. Is it really true that 1% of our time and effort keeps me going during the other 99% of the time???
It’s pretty amazing how quickly we can forget about the tenacity of the day-to-day grind with a win here and there. I encountered one of those “great win” moments recently after nearly 4 months of writing and verifying SQL queries. Over lunch, a coworker mentioned to me that his team was in desperate need of someone to build a test tool to verify that the HTML5 files we are creating visually matched the PDF files that we received from textbook publishers (these files are being used for a textbook e-reader). Without giving away the implementation details in this post, I can say that it was an awesome experience as was the recognition I received for a job well done!
The glory of that project will be enough to sustain me through the grind of building out the servers to run my code and probably several weeks after. Yeah, that pretty much adds up to the other 99%…
