4 ms·

"Perfect is the enemy of good" is another common argument I've heard used as an excuse to avoid implementing process improvements. Or the 'ol catch 22 of, we ju

"Perfect is the enemy of good" is another common argument I've heard used as an excuse to avoid implementing process improvements. Or the 'ol catch 22 of, we just don't have the time to invest in processes that will save us all time!

durbatuluk 9y ago
That fucking phrase was the motto of one of our devs. Fast-forward one year and we still don't deliver the product to client.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Aiming for perfection wouldn't have delivered the product any sooner, of course. Zero defects is something worth striving for at the lower levels of a product, stuff that is heavily reused by higher architectural layers. When you can have breakage at any level of the stack, engineers need to have too much context in their heads to correctly detect and resolve issues. In the worst case, they make local fixes that don't address the underlying problem, which turns into scar tissue that can make the underlying problem harder to resolve, besides damaging the codebase.
- Pharylon 9y ago
  That was hung on the door to the office of the DBA at my last job. One day, we had a catastrophic loss of data due to a junior developer running a destructive script against the production server instead of the test server. We went to restore the database only to discover the hourly snapshots had been failing for months and he hadn't noticed
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Almost all system failures are due to open loop processes. To evolve you need to rely on feedback.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Did you take his sign down?
hinkley 9y ago
The former you should talk about the difference between tolerable and good. There’s a lot of people who have a very low bar for Good Enough and no definition of Good at all. And different people don’t agree on what’s even tolerable. The latter can be fixed with the saw sharpening metaphor from Highly Effective People. There’s also If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. (Just because it works doesn’t mean it is t broken).

durbatuluk 9y ago

That fucking phrase was the motto of one of our devs. Fast-forward one year and we still don't deliver the product to client.

barrkel 9y ago
Aiming for perfection wouldn't have delivered the product any sooner, of course. Zero defects is something worth striving for at the lower levels of a product, stuff that is heavily reused by higher architectural layers. When you can have breakage at any level of the stack, engineers need to have too much context in their heads to correctly detect and resolve issues. In the worst case, they make local fixes that don't address the underlying problem, which turns into scar tissue that can make the underlying problem harder to resolve, besides damaging the codebase.
Pharylon 9y ago
That was hung on the door to the office of the DBA at my last job. One day, we had a catastrophic loss of data due to a junior developer running a destructive script against the production server instead of the test server. We went to restore the database only to discover the hourly snapshots had been failing for months and he hadn't noticed
- sitkack 9y ago
  Almost all system failures are due to open loop processes. To evolve you need to rely on feedback.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Did you take his sign down?

hinkley 9y ago

The former you should talk about the difference between tolerable and good. There’s a lot of people who have a very low bar for Good Enough and no definition of Good at all. And different people don’t agree on what’s even tolerable. The latter can be fixed with the saw sharpening metaphor from Highly Effective People. There’s also If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. (Just because it works doesn’t mean it is t broken).