Patterns of fail

Patterns of Fail Don't know, don't care

Why do we fail ?

Failure Failure is an option - most people working hard or seriously will have failures to account for. The most interesting and character defining trait of these people is how they recovered. Advocates for Competence based interviewing teach do concentrate on mistakes as learning experiencies. Honesty rings a bell - What was the last time you f* up and how you made up to that ?

Fail There is failure, and there is FAIL - Project managers managing HTML pages - Fail - Methodologies sold as silver bullet - Fail - Excess Excitement - Fail - Less code, more tests - Fail - Architecture of CRUD - Fail - Failure and then failure again - FAIL - Fall, Rise and Fail - EPIC FAIL

Behind the fail

Bikeshedding Parkinson's Law of Triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law_of_Triviality)

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Paper_clip

Entrepreneurs Once upon a time there was a 30-ish year-old vagrant who never had a job. He had never done a thing. He thought he was fucking clever so he started trying to convince people by doing magic stuff to impress dumb folks around the way. Not Jesus folks, meet the CULT OF REWORK

Entrepreneurs - Cult of Rework

Behavioral Patterns Lazy observer - Object to be realized some day Chain of irresponsibility (single irresponsibility principle) Dumb interpreter - impedance mismatch Mediator - the wireless phone Visitor - constant visitor to the project Strategy - see capt. obvious, prophets of the past

Lazy Observer "I just work here" "I am not the technical person (more from product owners)" " X is my role, and that was not described on it" Commitment. Ownership. The specialist.

Chain of Irresponsibility The naive belief in "Best practices" Broadcasting errors. Optimizations. Trust the database. Developer blames sysadmin, sysadmin blames network guys, network guys blames infrastructure which blames ...... "Hudson is not red anymore, time to go home" Github and Continous Integration

Dumb Interpreter Someone once said that there should be more tests than code. Then a horde followed back and forgot that good code works. Tons of tests for stupid code. DOJOs follow up. Until the day there is a project which is not a CRUD. Best practices for system administration should make developers and syadmins work together. Then someone comes with devops and Infrastructure as code and TDD for infrastructure - lets create a failing alarm, and correct it installing the proper service. Until you have 1M users with no service available.

Mediator Simply said, the guy between the manager and the programmer/sysadmin. Methodology roles that somehow morphs into job descriptions. WHO ?

Visitor Your pair on pair programming. The guy who checks his iPhone, his watch, corrects comment's spelling and helps writing commit messages while you are working on a CSS file. The guy that's keep arguing over trivial semantics (see bike shedding) Your very own partner, discussing which VIM theme is better for syntax highlight

Strategy So there is this guy who knows everything. He has the most amazing ideas about everything. He is Warren Buffett in somebody else's body. For some (unfair) reason, he doesn't own the company. But he is the man and start shitting theories, rules and products. When the real world comes over and proves he's a smartacus, then you realize he is ...

Captain Obvious is never wrong. Those ideas were not his. He always knew that the product would fail but he is altruistic and let people learn from their mistakes. At every moment, count on a perfect and didactic explanation to what went wrong and a fucking gigantic email blaming somebody else. Right in the sky, above all clouds... CAPTAIN OBVIOUS, THE PROPHET OF THE PAST

Futility Belt

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Patterns of fail

by gleicon on Nov 21, 2010

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