When things are automated, you just forget about them. And that's a good thing: you'd rather spend your time thinking about important things, like "is my design correct" or "should I be refactoring now". Developers who haven't embraced continuous integration yet spend way too much time doing something (builds) that are better left to automation. At the No Fluff, Just Stuff shows, one of the Sunday poll questions for the crowd is "How many are using continuous integration?" I'm always depressed to see that it's generally less than half the crowd. I can't think of any single practice that makes projects better than CI. Moving from building your project as a bunch of snowflakes (if you build using an IDE, what you build will be subtley different than what your neighbor builds, thus you aren't building the same thing: each build is like a snowflake) to a single, canonical build allows you to stop worrying about build problems. If it fails on the CI machine, it's broken, regardless of what happens on your machine. It frees you from the "midnight before the big demonstration, everyone's standing around Fred's machine because his is the only build that works" anti-pattern.
Having all that noise automated just lets you forget about it. As I was using the restroom in our Chicago office, I saw the perfect metaphor for this. Most of the newer buildings you enter now have auto-flush toilets, so that you don't have to touch any of the surfaces. It's become so common, in fact, that you forget that step in places that don't offer automatic flushing. In our office in Chicago, in the public restrooms, you see the "Thanks for flushing" sign on the wall. What a perfect metaphor! When it happens automatically, you can forget about it. When it doesn't, you have to remind people that it's important for the hygeine and smell of the environment to do the right thing.
If you haven't already, install auto-flushers for your project, in the form of continuous integration, and start thinking about more important things.
3 comments:
I call that business traveller's cognitive disorder, where you expect toilets to flush, sinks to dispense water and you find available power outlets as fascinating as a hungry lion finds a zebra.
Right! The metaphor is great! Thanks for the idea. It may someday help convincing someone :)
I saw a sign like that recently, but it took things a little farther. Right above the urinals it said "God is watching."
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