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Drinking the Dirty Water


By SD Times News Team
February 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
“I have traveled around the world and drunk the dirty water of many wells,” said Jitendra, “and drinking dirty water is necessary to gain a certain perspective on software development.” After reassuring me about our dinner plans, he continued to wax philosophical. The last of the color was draining from the Friday evening sky and, with management two hours gone in this direction and that, the issue was why software projects, even ones going relatively well, so often involve great drama and emotion.

When a system is conceived, continued Jitendra, it embodies the insight and experience of its conceiver, and the great achievement seems to be this conception. But even if we were to grant the conceiver absolute dictatorial power over the system, we would often see tears from his or her eyes.

As a system embodied in computer hardware, it has necessary characteristics. But the conceived system, that which is imagined and valued above all others, is a system not with computer characteristics, but with the characteristics of its originator. An extension of its creator, at least, if not an outright duplication! Jitendra laughed at the folly.

We drove in silence for a bit as I digested his point. Of course, most of the pain in development stems from more mundane problems: not listening to users, gaps in the dance between data and behavior, and constraints of the iron triangle of time, resources and function. But this didn’t seem to apply in this case—from my perspective (and, I believe, his), things had gone fine. Jitendra’s tough questions as client project manager had flushed out some isolated modifications and refinements that we needed to make, but as an architect of the system being reviewed, there hadn’t been a moment when I felt there was egg on our face. Yet not everyone in the room had been as sanguine.

At midweek, there had been a crisis. Voices were raised, tempers flared, teams had withdrawn to separate conference rooms to discuss what was to be done about all this. Some of this had undoubtedly been gamesmanship; certainly it took me longer to say “every modification has a time impact” than it would to simply change the label in the interface. But while I believe working code trumps documentation, this week had been about documentation, not code, so I intoned my mantra and took notes. Jitendra had voiced doubts, rejected any hand-waving and unflappably pushed the issues. Perhaps the others had been doing the same to some extent, but there was no doubt that strong emotions had been unleashed.


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