Saturday, September 5, 2009

What a software engineer can learn from YSR’s death

[Background: YSR was Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh (state) of India. He died in a chopper crash.]

One of the reason media figured out for YSR death is “he ignored safety processes/guidelines, and he influenced the aviation staff to fly during bad weather condition”.
Now question is whose mistake??
Is it the mistake of CM to influence staff who takes care of safety guidelines? Or it’s the mistake of staff that he got influenced???
I believe it’s the mistake of staff.
Very often this happens in software industry as well, we are given some tight schedule and we are forced to finish it. How you act in such scenario?? Mostly we try to finish that within deadline and we skip essential steps e.g. we skip unit testing, we skip code reviews and all of above we tend to write quick and dirty code.
Before doing anything like that you should ask a question to you.
Which is more dangerous?
· Refusing to work on tight guideline?
· Or writing quick and dirty code, and skipping process guideline?
Act accordingly!!
I personally refuse to work on tight guideline many time, because I think that might annoy my Boss for a moment but when something will go seriously wrong after product delivery, it might annoy whole company.
[sad about the death of a mass leader]