Listening to Radio 4 this morning (I love Farming Today!), I was listening to the news reporting that Jack Straw has executed a u-turn on the plan to build large prisons. To my amazement, people were mocking him for having changed his mind.
Much as I generally dislike Jack Straw, my opinion of him improved somewhat as a result of his ability to change his mind. As far as I understand the 30-second news story, he did the right thing. He had an idea, it looked to him like a good idea, he asked a few people what they thought, they didn’t like it and said it was a bad idea, he wasn’t sure, so he decided not to go ahead with what he now wasn’t sure was a good idea. If only more people felt able to do that.
From my perspective, he got two things right: he canvassed opinion, and he then used that to revise his decision. It is not a sign of weakness to ask other people to think about your problem with you. It is not a sign of weakness to then use their advice. It is not a sign of weakness to change your mind. It is a sign of weakness to blindly go ahead with what you now see is a bad idea just because you are not brave enough to hold up your hand and say you’ve made a mistake.
The same applies to development projects: if you see you’ve made a design mistake, you can always paper over it and leave it as a hidden treasure for the maintenance programmer who inherits the system. Or, you can bite the bullet, admit you’ve got it wrong, and then re-do the work until it is right. Unfortunately, it is hard to communicate to non-techs exactly why you need to re-do the work and why you are adding extra time to the project. It’s easier to pretend you haven’t noticed the problem and just steam ahead and meet deadlines.
The trouble is, when you get it wrong, users suffer. Good software is invisible to the user – they stop noticing what they are using to do their job, and just do their job. Bad software makes every task seem difficult and awkward. So I would argue (and have done) that it is better to nip the problems in the bud in the development stage, rather than leave it for someone to apply sticking plasters later on.
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