Haircut Help High-Quality Software
My messy hair taught me about software development.
Waking up next to my wife one day, she looked deep into my eyes and uttered “I think it’s time you got your haircut. You’re starting to look like a misshapen Pomeranian.”
“But it takes so long to cut, and it makes me feel so itchy. Sometimes the barbers make such a mess of it”, I retorted.
“But how much time and hair gel do you need to use every morning to make that mess presentable?”, my wife countered.
As I rolled out of bed, leaving a snail trail of hair gel down my pillow, something in my head clicked.
I realised delaying my haircut came at a cost: the longer I delayed my haircut, the longer the haircut would take, and the greater the chance the haircut would go wrong: no longer would the haircut be just a few snips here and there, but a major surgical procedure. Minor mishaps had often left me looking like someone from a different decade - and not one of the good ones.
Also, the longer I delayed my haircut, the longer I’d spend each morning trying to tame my hair with handfuls of gel.
This downward spiral reminded me of software development. As a fledgling developer, I delayed releasing my software changes to our users because it was such a boring and fiddly process. I instead collected my software changes into one big batch that I could release in one go later on.
I realised delaying the release of my changes came at a cost: the longer I delayed the release, the longer the release would take, and the greater the chance the release would go wrong: no longer did the release comprise one small change - but a complicated myriad of changes that were therefore more likely to contain a mistake and cause problems.
Also, the longer I delayed my release, the longer it would take to get software changes into the hands of our users and thereby solve a problem they were facing.
The takeaway? Small, frequent software releases are like good haircuts: they make you look good, sooner - with less headache. If the process is boring, fiddly, or itchy then it may be time to fix it - I now cut my hair in the bath.
