Pragmatic Dictator

One more chance to feel alive,

One more chance to wind up dead,

One more chance to climb so high,

One more chance to bust my head,

One more chance to get on top,

One more chance to make a change,

One more chance for shit to give,

One more chance to even the blame…….

Saliva - One More Chance - Blood Stained Love Story

A couple of false economies software development indulges in:

1. It’s quicker for me to write the code than explain the design to someone else.
2. Automated deployment will have to wait until we have more time.

Number one costs a software development team in a number of ways:

• The career development of other members of the team is slowed - if one never discusses design how does one expect to obtain good designers or architects?
• The team’s development capacity is reduced - essentially projects bottleneck around the uncommunicative heroic individual.
• The team’s effectiveness is reduced - project load cannot be divided efficiently because individuals have skills in narrow areas limiting the breadth of work they can perform.
• Team morale is damaged with other developers feeling left out, unfulfilled and unable to influence project decisions

Number two yields costs including:

• We save on some development time but the cost is re-surfacing in staff-hours required to perform the deployment.
• An increasing number of mistakes that extend deployment time or breaks releases.
• We save development time once and pay the price for that saved time with each and every deployment.
• The cost of each successive deployment increases because the system’s size is growing.
• As each deployment takes ever longer, the gap between releases is likely to increase.

No one would deliberately drive at night with their headlights off. It’s obvious why, we might make it to our destination but we’ll have run down a few pedestrians, bounced off some curbs, hit a lamp-post or two and slid into a few ditches. Were we to continue this way, our car would quickly turn into a useless wreck.

Driving with the headlights on allows us to see ahead, plan and anticipate a little, to think. In turn, our journey is more pleasant, the car lasts a lot longer and there’s much less risk of a fiery end.

Yet many companies drive with their headlights off when developing software. Silly deadlines with a non-negotiable set of features, fixed resource and no time to think. The result? A tangled mess of systems with zero-architecture, huge legacy, horrible brittleness and poor availability. And that most desired property of quick delivery is lost as it takes longer and longer to do even the most simple things.

There’s no substitution for prior thought and realistic planning. Yet so many eschew it whilst complaining about the results.

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