Versus Software

A few days ago while I was waiting for the the bus so I could go to work, I saw on the other side of the street a taxi driver trying to parallel park his car.

He initially used to wide of an angle to try to get into the parking spot, so after maneuvering the car in, he kept moving back and forth, trying to adjust the cab to the right spot. Unfortunally, since his initiall angle was so wide, no matter what he did he could not get the car close enough to the curb.

He kept going, back and forth for at least 2 minutes, until finally he moved the car completely out of the spot, took the right angle , and managed to fit the car perfectly in the parking spot this time.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I saw that I thought : “That’s a perfect software enginnering metaphor.” And indeed it is, heres why.

You see the vast majority of software managers when trying to do their job, aka manage software development, they usually list the things they should estimate: functional requisites, prototype, develop code, refactor, etc. They usually forget one simple and yet crucial thing:

You will throw code away.

Every software that’s used requires maintanance. Maintanance requires to increase or change the scope of software. As you do that, previous software under that new scope doesn’t function or isn’t the best for that system. They have to re-write things, start again, but with the new goal in mind.

But software managers usually don’t like the sentence “Throw code away”. It implies an idea of waste of time, or that any system can be adapted, it’s just a matter of figuring out how.

Those managers are doing exactly what that taxi driver was trying to do. Going back and forth with their code, hopeleslly trying to get their software/taxi in the right spot. They never will, and regardless of how many factors point to it, they won’t admit they’re bad drivers. To them the car will eventually set in the right spot, while in reality they should restart the parking procedure as a whole.

Those usually are bad managers, ones that I try to avoid. If they can’t park a car right, how the fuck do they plan to manage software development?