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| The Voice of the DBA |
| Simple(r) Coffee Starbucks has too many order combinations. This article about the challenges for their new CEO notes there are over 170,000 combinations of things customers can order. As someone who has visited a store often and stood behind someone placing an order, that sounds like an accurate number. Sometimes I hear people order things to drink that I had no idea were even possible. When there are too many choices, sometimes there can be a delay as the person tries to process the information and make a decision. Some people can't make a decision. Others enjoy the variety and keep making different decisions each time. That's fine if you're visiting a restaurant, but it's less useful if you're building software. I have worked with people who struggle to decide on an approach to solving a problem. In the C++ world, I'd see people struggling to organize classes and members, sometimes spending too much time researching and comparing different methods. They debate when is private or public appropriate, when do we need a superclass or subclass? We would see some paralysis by analysis from certain developers who are endlessly searching for the optimal approach. Other developers might change their approach constantly, resulting in a lack of consistency across the codebase. In the modern world, I sometimes see users experimenting with different libraries or packages (or data stores) with each new project. They might be consistent within a project for a period of time, but since many teams often shift to different projects over time (or maintain them), how helpful is this? If each new project looks different, we spend a lot of time on developers getting familiar with the technology. I have tended to adopt the philosophy of strong opinions, loosely held. In other words, I'll pick an approach/platform/technology/etc. and stick with it. Moreover, I'll ask everyone on the team to stick to a similar method of coding. If we need to change, then we can evaluate the proposed change, performance test it, and if we decide it's better, we all adopt this and slowly work to refactor old code as we have time. We never have time, so we only refactor when we have to touch old code for some fix or enhancement. However, when we do touch old code, let's improve it. My preference is to allow a limited set of technologies in our company at any point in time. We need a process to add or remove something, but this ought to be a decision made to limit our range of technologies and required expertise. I'm not against Python or PowerShell or MongoDB or any other technology, but I don't want things adopted because an individual prefers that technology or thinks it works better. They need to prove that there is a good reason to others, and as a group, we agree that the value of adding a new technology is worth the burden. Otherwise, we end up in the situation I see often in job descriptions: with a requirement that new hires know dozens of technologies at an expert level because we don't have that person on staff. And we'll never find them. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
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