Object Mentor Blog: Hot Sauce!

Hot Sauce!

Ben Rady — Wed, 16 May 2007 20:04:00 -0500

Good process is like Tabasco; A little goes a long way, and when it’s right, you hardly know it’s there.

I’m a huge Getting Things Done fan. I love quicksilver. Between my hipster PDA, and my many, many text files, I have 1001 ways to record a next action. And yes, that’s 9 ways for you super geeks out there.

Merlin Mann over at 43folders.com is also a huge GTD fan. Merlin made a very good point in one of his recent podcasts that I thought related directly to Agile methods. He was discussing the proclivity of people to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to perfect their system, rather than actually doing the the tasks the system is designed to support. “There is no tonic out there for productivity like actually doing something”, says Merlin. He likens GTD to a coffee cup…the point is the coffee, not the cup. When you’ve got it right, you shouldn’t have to pay any attention to it, you just let it do its job.

I agree with Merlin, and I would apply the same logic to software development. When agile methods are implemented well, somtimes you hardly notice there’s a system at all. You’re in the TDD flow, never being blocked, and rarely being interrupted by meetings. Your day seems to zoom past and at the end of it, as you survey your pile of passing tests, you feel like you actually did something. And you did.

By contast, poorly run projects seem to be almost entirely focused on the process, as though the process was the thing they were selling. Endless creation of documents, and meetings about the documents, and meetings about how to better document the meetings. Every once in a while, almost by accident, somebody gets around to writing some code. Some of it might even be useful to someone, someday.

The ingredients are few and simple, but just as fermenting salt, vinegar and ice cream doesn’t yield a tasty hot sauce, implementing a development process that is nigh-invisible takes more work than you might think. The results, however, are quite tasty.

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