Coding, the IKEA way

Today I spent some time mounting handles in an IKEA wardrobe I bought some weeks ago. Mounting handles is somehow a precision job, cause you don’t want your house to look like a cartoon room. So, I took measurements of the drawers, and of the handles, asked my wife in which position the handles looked better, tried to fit the preferred position with some basic proportion (so that the spaces above and below the handle are respectively ¼ and ¾ of the total drawer height), then calculated on paper the exact coordinates for the needed hole. The next step was to apply the measurement on the drawers. I didn’t have a professional measurement tape at home so I double checked all the measurements before marking with the pencil the final target for the drill. When I was satisfied wit the position I made a small hole with a nail in the exact position. Then I took the drill. Everything was in place so the result was pretty close to perfection.

It’s surprising how far we can go from this metaphor if we just turn back to our beloved coding activity. When asked to perform a simple, yet nontrivial, task, the average developer would switch on the IDE (I am optimistic, the IDE is obviously already on by default, and the mail client is now probably an Eclipse plugin) and start coding. A couple of lines there, a TODO marker when an ugly shortcut is taken, another couple of lines there, and the job looks almost complete. Then a failure during test sets the need for another quick fix just before the deadline. Ooops! Time for removing TODOs has gone, the code seem to work and there are more urgent things to do. In other words, the TODOs just made it to production. Cheers!

Let’s get back to my IKEA drawers. Really I should have started from the drill (which is my favourite tool anyway)! Making a couple of holes in the wardrobe (just to check if the drill worked) then refining the hole positioning by successive attempts. This way the handle probably wouldn’t be that aligned, or perfectly fixed, so I would probably have had to put some stuff to have the handles blocked some way. Of course there is only one probability over a million that all the handles are vertically aligned and centered in all the drawers, and I should have used some tape to close the unnecessary holes I did at the beginning, but as long as the whole wardrobe doesn’t fall apart I should have been pretty satisfied.

Ok, I probably went too far. Code can just be erased, while drill holes are irreversible. Well, code can be cleaned if you have time and we all know that you’ll never have…

Tags: Project management, Agile