Every developer has been confronted with the request, ‘Take your best guess,’ in working their way through a problem. Now, this puts an engineer in a very hard position. Many teams are conflicted when it comes to taking chances: you can take any chance you want, as long as you only pick the right solution. That makes it very hard to put a developer in that position, since it’s not really a guess if the only allowed outcome is 100% success. Continue reading “Risk, the Developer, and Patton”
Tag: Practicality
Possible But Not Practical
I recently was working on a project and got in one of those discussions where I was not communicating at all. I was trying simultaneously arguing that the software was something I could build, but one that would not work. I felt pretty confident in my abilities to build and deliver it, and, in fact, that it would be pretty cool once built.
However, I was also trying to indicate that because of its complexity, it would have the characteristics of an unstable nuclear isotope – it would not last long. The system in question wold require so much more human intervention to keep it correct than was available within the organization that every month of operation would put it further and further out of true. It was ‘Possible, but not Practical’. Continue reading “Possible But Not Practical”