There are times we do know that we should stop - we are in a middle of creative process, things are going great, suddenly something nasty is showing it’s face – but we do not stop to perform a plastic surgery, we merely cover it with makeup and we do go on chased by deadlines, “I will do it later” or “That’s not such a big deal” thoughts. I’m not talking about bugs here, we have to fix them in order for code to work – I think about ugly pieces of code, badly structured, copy – paste solutions etc. We all have been there right ? How many times we actually did went back to fix those problems ? How many of those stabbed us in a back just at worst time possible ?

While reading “The Toyota Way” I was fascinated by one principle and how much does it relates to software development profession – “Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time”.

“Quality takes precedence (Jidoka). Any employee in the Toyota Production System has the authority to stop the process to signal a quality issue.”

That’s right, one person can stop whole production line at a first sight of a problem. This is one of the milestones of Toyota success and at the first moment it might seem ridiculous. So what happens next ? Problem is solved as quickly as possible by using all strengths of production group.

In our software development world stopping our coding process and gathering all team members seems so easy and cheap – yet we do still have this “I will do it later” mind set. But it’s time to face the truth - this actually doesn’t work, we are never going to get back to this wrong piece of code unless it’s going to hurt us badly. So maybe we should stop cheating ourselves and instead adopt some good principles from others ?