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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Nothing More Permanent Than A Temporary Solution" |
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date = 2019-07-29 |
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[taxonomies] |
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tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "code", "writing code", "temporary solutions"] |
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Depending on where you look, "Nothing more permanent than a temporary |
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solution" is either an old Russian proverb or a quote by Milton Friedman. |
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Thing is, temporary solutions, unless you think about the future to fix them, |
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will become permanent. |
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A temporary solution may appear either as a proof-of-concept or due some |
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restrained deadline. You may create perfect [system |
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specs](/books/things-i-learnt/spec-first), you may have a perfect |
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understanding of the whole [in your Gherkin |
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files](/books/things-i-learnt/gherkin) but, at some point, you'll put some |
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small script to fix a minor problem, or do a "not so good" solution to a point |
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due to deadlines. |
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This happens and unless you take steps to get rid of those, you'll end up with |
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a bunch of spaghetti code pretty fast. And that will snowball to a point that |
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you won't be able to manage the project. |
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Once a scrum master suggested that we came with an idea to our product manager |
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to do something akin to "Every three sprints, we'll focus on product value; |
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the fourth one is ours to fix the things that are annoying us". I don't think |
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we ever talking to the product manager about this, but we managed to open |
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issues on our ticket system about the small warts we left behind, specially |
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due deadlines. So there we had, a specially crafted bug type for "technical |
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debt" which we never actually took the time to fix. |
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Unless you have a pretty good safety net to fix those, they will life forever. |
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And it may be a better option to tell "we can't deliver in time" than adding |
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(yet another) temporary solution, as hard as it is to convince the higher ups |
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that you can't deliver the product with a temporary solution. |
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{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/run-locally", prev_chapter_title="If It Doesn't Run On Your Computer, You Have A Problem", next_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/config-file", next_chapter_title="The Config File Is Friend") }} |
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