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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March 18th, 2008 at 4:00 am
Great analogy Dan! Large corporations and Governments are typically the worst offenders of this type of thinking. By I am really commenting on this for a very different reason….
Back around 98 or 99, I went on a dive trip in West Palm Beach with several friends; I drove my car. I live in Tampa Florida and so taking trips like this are easy. Well, we did 4 dives that day. The dives were all good, and afterwards we all had a great dinner and talked about the cool stuff we experienced during the dives. Well, all of us had to work the next day and so we ending up leaving West Palm Beach at midnight. The drive is about 3 hours long, plus the time to drop everyone off. Well, I was driving and everyone else passed out….pretty soon I was starting to fade. So, to keep myself awake, I started driving with the lights off; the roads were lightly traveled at that time of night. The rush of driving without the lights forced me to focus and kept me from falling asleep; I was pretty damn wiped out so I needed to do something extreme to stay alert. Well pretty soon one of my friends Barbara woke up and saw me doing this. She immediately decided to switch places with the other guy and talk to me the rest of the way. I drove with the lights on the rest of the trip…
