Identifying Problems that Already Have A Historical Lessons Learned

Recently I ran into a problem that I had I had solved before.   This time the solution was being implemented by another developer. As it turns out, he ran into the same traps that I fell into when I solved that problem.  The only problem is that I was not able to identify all the pitfalls before hand.   

How did I fail to identify the traps and pitfalls?  I had been there before, but I failed to pass along these lessons learned.  My danger antenna never went up.

What lead me to buy into the his solution and eat a big piece of the gullible cake was  three things:

  •  Being under extreme pressure to a meet deadline
  •  Believing in the confidence of this very capable programmer "Oh it's easy, I got it, I will have in a couple of hours"
  •  The alternative solution was many times harder so this seemed to be a silver bullet

In the end then solution worked but it was many times more effort than the programmer assured me.  And much of that has to do with being my fault.

I am dissapointed in myself because I did not ask my self what lessons I had learned previously and then therefore did not pass the information on.

So what do you do to when faced with a challenge to ask yourself "Have I been here before?" and if the answer is yes, how do go about identifying the lessons learned in order to pass them on?

Just something to think about.  I am interested in hearing your answer to this question.

Comments

Domepeace said…
I guess that would put you in a difficult spot. I know that the mantra can be to "Trust your programmers." But it's not always so cut and dry when a deadline looms. I wish I had the answer. Maybe there is no concrete answer. Maybe you handled it the best way based upon the circumstances.
September 28, 2011 at 6:41 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Putting Files on the Rackspace File Cloud

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Asp.Net MVC and I (along with some friends) am creating an Asp.Net MVC application that can access files from our website. This means that files must display on the site as well as provide a way to download/upload them. I won’t give away all the details of the project but I will say this: Sharing photos is one of the driving forces for our project.  The files are only image type files( jpg, etc) The files must be uploaded by the users and stored somewhere within our system.  We don’t necessarily know at this time how much storage space we need but we think that we will need a little at first but possibly a lot more down the road. This means that the storage of these files must be scalable. The uploading of files must be controlled by our system.  Right off the bat we started our application and were uploading files to the web server with no problem.  We only did it this way to kind of prove our system model. We were just basically writing
Read more

Setting Up XnaMobileUnit to run unit tests in Windows Phone 7 XNA Games

Image
Introducing XnaMobileUnit I decided to roll my own unit test framework for Windows Phone 7 XNA games.   I have a couple of reasons why I decided to roll my own.  Among them was the fact that you cannot reference regular .Net assemblies from Windows Mobile Framework.  That means that referencing NUnit was out of the question.  Also using some of the other libraries that can be used for Silverlight Applications didn't quite feel right for me. The framework that I have created, XnaMobileUnit, is very simple to use and provides all the necessary functionality to run unit tests.  I am still working on the framework to provide a few more capabilities and features, but for the most part it is ready to use out of the box.  XnaMobileUnit is open source licensed under the Apache 2.0 License and can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/xna-mobile-unit/ .  I recommend downloading the latest source and compiling it then referencing the new DLL. Otherwise you can simply download the l
Read more

Reasons to Stay Away from CSLA

We've been using CSLA - Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture in a product for approximately one year and while it solves quite a few problems it violates some major good practices. No Clear Separation of Layers While at the time that we chose CSLA we knew very little about domain driven design, it is no excuse for the framework to possess the data access layer within the business object. This makes it extremely difficult to separate the concerns. As a result, it is difficult to mock the data-access layer creating many problems when attempting to perform unit tests. This also puts the additional responsibility of data access on the business object class, violating the Single Responsibility Principle( SRP ). Data access layer should be totally separated from the business object period. Having the data access within the within the BO class is not the only additional responsibility placed on the class but is the most significant one I can think of. No Context Validation
Read more