Gandalf Hudlow
The value-destroying effect of arbitrary date pressure on code
An Article by Gandalf HudlowThe mandate from above is clear, just get it done! Avoid everything that's in the way: all advice, all expertise, all discovery efforts that detract from hitting the Date™!
What these organizations don't realize is that all software change can be modeled as three components: Value, Filler and Chaos. Chaos destroys Value and Filler is just functionality that nobody wants. When date pressure is applied to software projects, the work needed to remove Chaos is subtly placed on the chopping block. Work like error handling, clear logging, chaos & load testing and other quality work is quietly deferred in favor of hitting the Date™.
Software that nobody wants
An Article by Gandalf HudlowFinding value is the result of enabling individual and group-level discovery attempts. It's not the result of everyone following one leader's gut.
What just happened is a new software product/feature was created that no customer wanted. This happens way too often. In fact, most hyper important software projects that must be done by date certain or else, have deep flaws that cause some variation of this phenomenon, flaws that include:
- Not wanted - Company specified a solution to a problem that customers don't actually have
- No Rarity - Company is pursuing an iKnockoff of existing products. The market already has two scaled competitors with working solutions, customers naturally spend budget on products that are already successful to avoid risk
- Incorrect Packaging - Customers need a website, but the company created an iOS app instead
- Incorrect Pricing - Customers need SaaS pricing, but the company created a shrink wrapped, on-premise solution with CapEx and maintenance agreements instead
A Reflection of the Truth
The need to record
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
Mental infrastructure
The diary provides the mental infrastructure that stimulates the mind to remember.
Scientific writing
What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products.
A three-layered process of documentation
A three-layered process of documentation:
(1) First, there is the field notebook. This is where the actual numbers are recorded, together with passing observations relevant to the interpretation of these numbers.
Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data.
(2) The journal is a parallel record to that of the notebook—a daily account of events, thoughts, and observations.
(3) Last of the three strata, then, are the publications. Traditionally, in science, these are articles in academic journals leavened with chapters in books. To be successful, a young scientist need aspire to no more than these two forms of output together with their oral versions at interminable conferences and meetings of learned societies.
There came a time in my scientific development, however, when other forms of publication became important: magazines articles, and writing books.
Incidental details
In these journals lay the incidental details by which a book can be differentiated from a set of scientific articles. Such incidental details can become ends in themselves.
Memory prompts
Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience.