Well, I’ve proven to myself that I can do the single parenting thing if I have to—and do it competently. I’ve also never been happier about going to the airport than I am today—Gerald’s flight gets in a little after 10. We’ll all be very glad to have him home.
All in all, it’s been a very good week, though busy. I’ve managed to keep the house clean (including laundry and bathrooms, no small accomplishment around here), feed myself and the kids healthy foods, polish off a lot of languishing “to-do” items, and pull off a very successful seminar for the lab this afternoon. (I’ll be posting the presentation and related links on the LSC site this weekend.)
What I haven’t done is sleep. Not enough, at least. I’ve been getting to bed after midnight each night, and waking up at 6:30am so that I can get the kids up by 7 and off to school by 7:30. And I haven’t had much of a chance to exercise, either. Or get to Al-Anon meetings. Or do much blogging. So while we all survived—and even thrived—this week, clearly this is not a sustainable model.
Just stumbled across an article called “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas,” by Bill Venners. The summary says “Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about software craftsmanship and the importance of fixing the small problems in your code, the ‘broken windows,’ so they don’t grow into large problems.” But there’s a lot more to it than that. Here’s a great passage from near the beginning of the article.
Bill Venners: What is the broken window theory?Andy Hunt: Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same demographics and economic makeup—would become a hell hole where the cops were scared to go in. They wanted to figure out what made the difference.
The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn’t touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works.
They did more studies and developed a “Broken Window Theory.” A window gets broken at an apartment building, but no one fixes it. It’s left broken. Then something else gets broken. Maybe it’s an accident, maybe not, but it isn’t fixed either. Graffiti starts to appear. More and more damage accumulates. Very quickly you get an exponential ramp. The whole building decays. Tenants move out. Crime moves in. And you’ve lost the game. It’s all over.
We use the broken window theory as a metaphor for managing technical debt on a project.
Bill Venners: What is technical debt?
Andy Hunt: That’s a term from Ward’s Wiki. (See Resources.) Every time you postpone a fix, you incur a debt. You may know something is broken, but you don’t have time to fix it right now. Boom. That goes in the ledger. You’re in debt. There’s something you’ve got to fix. Like real debt, that may be fine if you manage it. If you’ve got a couple of those—even a lot of those—if you’re on top of it, that’s fine. You do a release get it out on time. Then you go back and patch a few things up. But just like real debt, it doesn’t take much to get to the point where you can never pay it back, where you have so many problems you can never go back and address them.
I’ve been in organizational debt for a long time now. It will take me a while to climb out of the hole, but I’m determined to do it—at home and at work. This week I’ve had a taste of what debt-free living could feel like, and it’s awfully nice.
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