On alcoholism, chainsaws and deliberate practice
I’ve been running a lot of training courses recently and I’ve noticed that once people have chosen where they’re going to sit, they return to that position every day. We are creatures of habit, and some habits seem to form very quickly. If I rearrange the room before the second day, or ask people to change places, no-one seems particularly bothered – they simply go and find another seat. So, having a fixed seating position seems to be a habit that’s easy to slip into, yet easy enough to break.
Other habits are harder to shift. We’ve all probably tried to modify our behaviour using rational thought and wishful thinking. For short periods of time it can even look like we’ve succeeded, but then some stimulus knocks us off course and we revert to our previous behaviour. It’s for this reason (I guess) that members of Alcoholics Anonymous always consider themselves “alcoholics that haven’t had a drink for <some time>” where <some time> can range from hours to years. Avoiding your old behaviour is certainly the first challenge. The next, and harder, challenge is becoming comfortable with your new behaviour. This is as true for our work habits as it is for any others.
The habit that I see many teams having trouble breaking, is the habit of forgetting their quality aspirations when they come under pressure. As deadlines loom I often hear people talking about “adding the tests later” or doing something “just for now”. A lot has been said about technical debt (see Martin Fowler’s excellent post or my contribution to “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”), but I think many of these habitual, time-driven responses can’t really be considered technical debt. They’re more like […]
