Any time we make a decision to ignore a problem, or attempt to work around it, we make more work for ourselves.

That additional work turns into something akin to the death of a thousand cuts. The problem never goes away and the associated consequences continue to manifest all over the place. And as the problem gets tougher so there are more and nastier consequences to deal with and they are harder to work around. Eventually, something has to give…….

This is really a long hard-learned life lesson which has some convenient applications in software engineering…..

Consider a bug in some code you’re using - if you don’t fix that bug, you end up dotting workarounds all over to cope with the presence of this bug. The same problem occurs with a badly written API, all around your code there will be compensations for it.

I was reminded of this recently when discussing code-lifecycle issues which is a nasty problem, make no mistake. Some members of the discussion wanted to accept the issues as unsolvable and work around them leading to hideously complex architectures and masses of code scattered all over the system. Myself and a couple of others felt it better to tackle the problem head on and came up with a simple solution that’s small and easy to use. Most importantly, the solution relieves us of the burden of tackling all those hideous consequences.

This lesson can also be applied to systems architecture in general. For example, the general policy to place firewalls at the borders of corporate networks which accept nothing unless it’s on port 80 has resulted in a raft issues which exert significant costs on our software and hardware infrastructure.

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