Friction is not a bug. Friction is the mechanism by which we build understanding. Every shortcut you take through a problem is a piece of understanding you didn’t build. And understanding compounds. The person who struggled through debugging for years sees patterns that the person who always asked AI simply cannot see. My friend Stu Crocker once said something that stuck with me deeply: “Quality is the absence of unnecessary friction.” I love that and made it my mantra. But the key word is “unnecessary.” Not all friction is bad. Some friction is the price of admission. It’s on us to learn to tell the difference between the friction we should eliminate and the friction we need to push through. No pain, no gain, as they say. And right now, too many people are removing all the friction, including the kind that makes them grow.

There is an activity as part of Systems Thinking which is zooming in and zooming out. According to studies at the Cornell University people tend to not zoom out. Nearly everyone zooms in, nearly no one zooms out. I think that I’m part of “nearly no one”. In Systems Thinking theory zooming in refers to breaking up a whole into parts. Then taking a part and breaking it up again, and so on. Zooming out is taking a whole and looking at it as part of something bigger. Then taking that again and look what it’s a part of. When using different perspectives zooming in and zooming out is not necessarily a repeatable process. 

Before my actual testing career started, I was a "manual tester" for a week in ~2001, stepping in for a colleague. My job was to test the installation manual for a piece of software. That is what manual tester means in the context of software, right?