Tears

To me, emotions are like little personal compasses that help us drive our lives by pointing at right and wrong.
If it feels right, then it is right, If it feels wrong, then it is wrong.

Reading and using those little compasses is much harder than using the North/South magnetic needle kind, because they are subjective and easily manipulated. You may recall that after a few conversations with the Emperor, Darth Vader's emotions moved him the wrong way.

Emotions are felt as physical sensations: your bowels ache, you lose your breath, your heart runs wild, and your throat goes dry. I will not bore you with the details, mainly because I don't understand them, but tears are one of the ways your conscience tells you things about you. You know ... things.

I could tell you about my tears, when they come, and what they mean, but I guess that is a little too personal to be shared and understood.

Fungus

Defects

Preventing, finding and fixing defects is necessary to deliver a (reasonably) defect free product. There is an optimum cost (when cost of quality is at its minimum) for (reasonably) defect free products and services, and it depends on the right combination of prevention, detection and correction.
Reasonable for the specific customer needs, that is.

Customers accept these premises on any engineering project except for systems and software ... I guess we are not good at explaining why it is good to test, why it is in the best interest of our customer to test, why validation is necessary even if we have verification in place.

Finding and fixing defects at a cost that is smaller than preventing them is good business, adds value and must be done.

Using our customers resources to find and fix defects that could have been prevented (at a reasonable cost) is wrong, does not add value and must be eliminated.

Fungus