I love the first quote for how (ironically) true it is:
"Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like try[ing] to lose weight by weighing yourself more often."
From someone who has lost over 15kg in the past in few months, one of the things that helped most was starting weighing myself as I didn't do that previously. It kept reminding me that I wasn't still there and gave me more motivation
And it's actually been confirmed in a recent study:
"Frequent Self-Weighing and Visual Feedback for Weight Loss in Overweight Adults"
"The major finding of this study is that the use of frequent weighing accompanied by visual feedback of weight, without a prescribed diet or exercise plan, was effective in producing a small but sustainable weight loss in overweight males."
What is "more often" ? Weighing yourself daily is useless, since the weight fluctuates too much. Not to mention that "weight" is useless as well, while you're actually trying to loose FAT. Fat percentage and resulting lean body mass (body weight minus body fat) are the metrics to measure. But still a waste of time doing it daily, twice per week to gain insight on the delta and where it's trending is enough.
Weighing yourself daily is not useless. The idea of doing it weekly is being spread explicitly because GenPop doesn't understand the concepts of a moving average and a low-pass filter - instead, they freak out over those daily fluctuations. If you weigh yourself daily and remember to always look at the average of the last few samples, you get a more useful indicator of your current weight trend.
It's not useless, it taught me that weight fluctuates a lot by the hour and some by the week (;
I took the average of the 3-4 last days at the same time (about waking up) is a good enough approximation. Once I learned this, "more often" means once daily, as opposed to "once monthly" (if any). It wasn't only about the hard number, it was about the motivation.
"Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like try[ing] to lose weight by weighing yourself more often."
From someone who has lost over 15kg in the past in few months, one of the things that helped most was starting weighing myself as I didn't do that previously. It kept reminding me that I wasn't still there and gave me more motivation