Software industry is probably the most chaotic, unstructured field to date. I hope I am wrong but four and a half years into this industry, no one can prove me wrong.

Today we had a heated discussion on how much corners we should cut (how much less we can do) to make our looming deadline. We delivered software with CLIENT and we have a HOST version as well for internal testing. Under rare circumstances, we ship HOST as well. In all our previous and current release, we have both CLIENT and HOST.

Because of some technical issues with our build system, we have some delay. The delay has thrust us into the spotlight of NOT having things done. Then we tried to cut corners. Hmmm……..maybe we can have our build QAed without HOST. After all, HOST is just a convenience for QA analysts. For the feature we are testing, we can use our current production release HOST setup to test our newer CLIENT. It is fine for right now. Plus………..we are REALLY behind our schedules.

Guess what, we need to cut corners. And I agree, reduce scope, or whatever you call it, but not a price that we all have to live with it.

I forgot where I read it (I thought it was from the book “Writing Legacy Code”), there is a saying that goes “code base is our house, we LIVE in it.”

The saddest part is, we have bad technical decisions made based on influence from certain team members to get out easily (or to get to do their fun, coding tasks) than to get the right things done for the team and company as a whole.

It has been a very sad day for me. Even sad is that we allow other pressures to let us into making decisions that we will have to live with. I said WE because it is a team decision. A broken team that everyone does not know what to do, what policy we have, and sort of free flow of how you want to suggest things to be done.

Software is more than just technical, it is political and it is very touchy because it is the art of design in a technical way.

And identity management is hard to practice in ad-hoc environment.

Worse though, and most common as well, those who make bad decisions do not stay on the job long enough, or usually do not have to live through the consequences of the decision.

I start to love software development, at a point where I dreaded some unrealistic, and inconsiderate decisions. And yes, I hear you, it is just the beginning.