Now that's out of my system

The last two posts were essays that I wrote a little while ago to clarify my thoughts, a bit big for blog posts I guess, but maybe they'll be the right thing for someone sometime.

So, more bloggishly, (to keep the spelling checker happy I guess I could say, "in a more blog-like style", but I like "more bloggishly"):

I've been chatting with a friend who's been disappointed by some experiences in a new job. They have a demanding client and a backlog of bugs, the new starts are being thrown at the maintenance problems, things the experienced folk think should be simple fixes, and it's not going well.

Sadly, simple fixes are normally only simple if handled by the longest serving staff. No one else should feel confident that just patching the problem somewhere is going to be fine without good testing or some formal verification.

And, indeed, those experienced old hands may be right, these may be problems needing only simple patches to resolve. But anyone without their experience of the peculiarities of a system and it's history, and without a safety net of a thorough testing process, can't make those little fixes. Without experience of a system the only professional thing to be done is explore it thoroughly, test as much as possible, and proceed with caution.

I've noticed this before: people with deep experience of a system come to be unconscious of what they know, and assume that things are simple and obvious, (and sometimes get damned obnoxious when it's not so for others).

So if you want to optimise for quality and development throughput the new starts get the problems that can only be solved by thorough exploration, broad testing, and general caution. And the long serving staff get the little maintenance chores.

Heh, in my world they'd still all be collaborating closely and back filling tests over the legacy functionality when those little maintenance tasks come up. But in my world dividing developers into an underclass of maintenance developers and on overclass of new feature developers doesn't happen, that's optimising for hubris, a trap I escaped with my mental and physical health in tatters...