Unsexy! However, screwing up the schedules and slacking off during the initial stages of any schedule and pulling all nighters at the end seems heroic! In nine out of ten cases I have seen these efforts as stupid firefighting and unnecessary work that could have been avoided in the first place, if proper planning is done and execution is spread out evenly from the beginning. The teams that do this right, make them seem easy. However, the first pre-requisite for this is an open mind where every aspect of the project is open to scrutiny! The worst form of superstitious learning I have seen at least in the Bay Area is this whole aspect of “working through the night” hacker culture! What a fraud! Software engineering work if properly planned and executed should not consume more than a 40 to 50 hour week even for the most demanding of schedules. This always helps in mitigating the ill-effects of superstitious learning. To discuss what went wrong and get to root causes rather than superficial stuff. That’s where digging deeper into why some methods worked and some did not, is immensely useful! Many good software engineering outfits do a release review after every release. It’s just knowing when it might be appropriate when they are not that makes learning a non-superstitious one! However, if one takes the trouble to understand why something worked in some situations in all the associated context, there is a way of turning superstitious learning into useful methodologies appropriate in some situations. Boom! Methods appropriate to that situation like rapid prototyping and extreme programming were born! It doesn’t mean that these new methods are useless. So older methods like Requirements, Design, development and Testing were taking too long. Insert coins into the OOP machine, Voila! Software of the highest quality pours out like a one-armed bandit in Vegas on your luckiest day! Internet businesses needed to go public with stupid business models and had to get some software written fast, good enough for the founders and investors to make their millions and go skiing in Lake Tahoe. Then Object Oriented programming was going to solve all your problems with software. There was a time when SDLC was all the rage as the most popular development methodology. Also assigning the wrong cause and effect reasoning to something you do. That’s Superstitious Learning – getting set in ways that work, sort-of, when there are better ways of doing things. Thinking that if you want to rain, inserting coins into the parking meter is the way to go is laughable. She was burning it and then scraping off the black stuff! Why? She didn’t know any other way of making toast! This was the second time when it started raining when you were inserting coins into the parking meter. Pervades every aspect of IT from management of infrastucture to software engineering methodologies! Read this interesting story about a girl who was observed making toast for herself.
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