One of the side effects of aging and getting wiser (except of getting fatter and grumpier) is gaining ability of discovering parallels and deeper meanings. Notion of giving and receiving, how every single small thing done by someone shows how he/she does everything else or even how starting your day in bad mood affects our whole day. But I’m not here to write about some funky New Age stuff, the thing I wanted to share today is my discovery of great knowledge that was coined before first line of code was written (although I’m not actually sure whether it wasn’t punched around that time).
We software developers have tendency to put our failures on shoulders of “not enough time” / “undecided customers” / “bad specs” / “someone before me made a mess here”, but as a core of this problems we do point our fingers at bridges! Yes we do, we are bravely stating that those things whose main purpose is making our daily commute to other side of a river easier, were actually build for plenty of centuries already, whole generations of architects were thinking about every single detail of those constructions, and most importantly it was written and coined how to build them. And we poor software developers are coding for a few decades at most, it is still wild wild west, nothing is straight or settled and we basically have to walk with our eyes blindfolded to finish our jobs.
But maybe, just maybe, there is knowledge who applies to software creation process pretty well, maybe there are already core values that we can use, maybe there is a parallel world of programming ? Well while reading “The Toyota Way” by Jeffrey K. Liker I had exactly those thoughts. I was fascinated by similarities between our profession and the way Toyota organized their company to become world no. 1 car manufacturer. At first I was skeptical – how on earth ideas how to create a repeatable product can apply to something that was closer to prototyping one single vehicle. After immersing myself into this subject I found out they actually can – and they were partially for example in Agile Movement.
I hope you liked this teaser post, more in next part of this small series…