On broken windows
One of the many beneficial side effects of the conference was that I learned about the Pragmatic Set of Books. I managed to get "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Pragmatic Unit Testing" and I thought that anybody who reads this blog should know about the broken window concept.
"In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict.
A broken window.
One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality."
Source: The pragmatic programmer - A Hunt, D Thomas - Chapter 1 - Software Entropy
I think that the concept of having a broken window ruining a whole project and setting an open path for disaster is very true and applicable to both software and real life. I can recognize that I'm very susceptible to fall in the trap. Apart from code where I've seen it happen in my projects it also happens in daily life - I try to diet and keep it up until I break the first window by eating a piece of cake, I try to stop swearing until the first time somebody pisses me of and sets me on my usual route, and the list goes on and on...
I can also identify with the cleaning up the glass. If say I tidy up a project by refactoring, updating documentation etc. I have a feeling that the project is back up to scratch once again and is alive. The same happens with my room when I tidy up and everything is in order I start liking to live in the room again, until I break the first window again by leave it uncleaned for a day.
Word: pragmatic Meaning:
- archaic - Busy, Officious, Opinionated
- relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters : practical as opposed to idealistic
- relating to or being in accordance with philosophical pragmatism
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