(IMPORTANT: If you think comics are for children, please contact me on Skype before you continue reading. I’d like to have a clarifying chat with you. My ID: ilarihenrik)

Osamu Tezuka has drawn a lot in his short life that unfortunately lasted only 60 years. The mangas and gekigas above are from my Tezuka section and they represent only 8.2% of what he has created in his lifetime. Osamu Tezuka is one of the most incredible practitioners, not only by the standards of the manga industry.

We test software, Osamu Tezuka draws stories. Is there anything to learn from the great man? Or is this just some forced analogy? Maybe, maybe not. Let’s see if there is something we can make use of.

Do it every day
Osamu Tezuka has drawn every single day of his life. There was no day where he just sat around idly. He has drawn more than 700 tomes of manga with a total of about 150’000 pages and he was involved in countless films as well.

Shouldn’t we consider practicing our craft every single day? What have YOU done software testing wise today? Regular practice is the key to greatness.

Be a good story teller
Reading Tezuka makes you aware of his incredible story telling abilities. Some of his mangas stretch over more than 2500 pages (e.g. the great Buddha series — on the picture above on the lower right corner), and there are simply no passages that are boring. His stories are fantastic.

In order to practice bug advocacy, you essentially need to be a good and convincing story teller. Testing still often needs to be “sold”. The better you can come up with a convincing story of why it is important, the better your life as a tester will be.

Assemble people who help you
In order to keep up the pace, Tezuka had a big group of people who helped him with his stories by doing the blackening or the application of patterns or drawing the less prominent characters in the background. Tezuka acknowledged that he could not do everything himself and that it is helpful to have friends in his proximity who not only helped with the texturing but also criticized his work.

I believe that is something which makes the context-driven school of testing very strong as well. We tend to watch ourselves and give constant feedback while pushing ourselves to become better every day. It is a value we should be aware of.

To have some additional educational background is helpful
It might be a lesser known snippet of fact that Osamu Tezuka was a medical doctor. Although he never practiced as a physician, he has actually graduated as a doctor. This resulted in him being able to draw physiologically correct and fascinating details in some of his stories. I can highly recommend his collection of short stories about the outlaw doctor Black Jack. These short stories are outstanding. And they are outstanding because Tezuka included a second skill into his art. The fusion resulted in something far more remarkable.

That’s why it would make sense for us testers to educate ourselves in a wide variety of other topics. We should read about social sciences, immerse ourselves in ethnological methods of qualitative data gathering, psychology, cognitive sciences and of course mathematics should become our friends. And a lot of other matter, too.

Not being certified allows you to be great
Ha! Who would have thought that Tezuka is with us in this regard. Again, his outlaw doctor Black Jack is NOT CERTIFIED. And he does not even want to be certified because he has trained his skills to become the greatest surgeon on the planet.

Mushi Production
Well, the translation of the name of his animation studio - Mushi Production - is: bug production.

(An irrelevant yet interesting side note: While writing this post, my editor constantly tried to correct “mangas” to “mangos”, which I found hilarious because of my automatic spell checker’s complete unawareness of context)

tags: practice, skill, testing, learning