Bulldozer00's Blog

It’s funny to watch software development teams hack away for months building a just barely working patch-quilt monster that they can hardly understand themselves – and then scramble at the last minute generating design documents for some big upcoming management design review or “independent” auditor dog and pony show (woof woof!).

In this Curiously Recurring Scramble Pattern (CRSP), a successful attempt to avoid the labor of thinking is made as developers frantically sprinkle Doxygen annotations throughout the code and/or load the beast into a reverse engineering tool that mechanistically generates UML diagrams to model the as-built mess. It goes without saying that the tool’s “verbose” mode is selected in order to obscure meaning and promote the illusion of high falutin’ sophistication. Of course, all of this is a waste of time (= $$$$) because the dudes doing the reviewing (self-important managers and bureaucratic auditors) don’t want to understand a thing.

When the review or audit does take place; a couple of cream puff questions and comments are bantered about, check boxes are ticked off, a couple of superficial “action items” are generated, and the whole lovefest is rubber-stamped as a great success. Whoo Hoo, we rock!

Without a doubt, you and I have never been culturally forced to participate in an instantiation of the CRSP. We are above that nonsense, right? We do something like this.

“A meeting is a refuge from the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought.” – Bernard Baruch