A Fable about Developer/Tester Relationships
A Fable about Developer/Tester Relationships
Does trying to get developers to test their code feel like trying to get your children to clean their rooms? Some say yes. In this column, the author spins a tongue-in-cheek fable about room cleaning strategies. Your comments are invited.
Once upon a time in a land far away where many fables took place, there lived groups of parents and their children. The parents and children were locked in constant conflict. Every day the parents said to their children, "Clean your rooms." Every day the children refused. The parents asked again and again. The children refused again and again. Discouraged, the parents consulted with each other. They decided that clean rooms were important. They also decided that their current approach was not resulting in clean rooms, so they decided to formulate a plan.
The first strategy the parents used was to shout louder at their children. "CLEAN YOUR ROOMS" was their cry. The parents repeated their demand over and over but the children did not respond. In bewilderment the parents asked, "Why won't you clean your rooms?" The children gave the following excuses: One said, "My room's only a little messy." Another replied, "It's not fun to clean my room. I'd rather play with my friends." A third responded, "It's not intellectually challenging." A fourth said, "Make me clean my room and I'll run away from home." Frustrated, the parents met together to devise another approach. They hired a consultant who quickly exclaimed, "Of course your children don't clean their rooms. They don't have the necessary room cleaning skills. They need training!"
So, the second strategy was to train the children in the science of room cleaning. The children were sent to training seminars. Room cleaning courses were brought in-house. Attendance at national cleaning conferences was made mandatory, but the children still didn't clean their rooms. Frustrated, the parents met together to devise another approach. They hired a consultant who quickly exclaimed, "Of course your children don't clean their rooms. They lack proper motivation!"
So, the third strategy was to motivate the children. Posters proclaiming Room Cleaning Is Job One appeared overnight. Motivational speakers such as Colin Powell, Barbara Bush, Zig Ziglar, and Debbie Fields were recruited to sing the praises of clean rooms. Each child was given a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Room Cleaners, but the children still didn't clean their rooms. Frustrated, the parents met together to devise another approach. They hired yet another consultant who quickly exclaimed, "Of course your children don't clean their rooms. Your children are incorrigible. They simply can't clean their rooms."
So, a fourth strategy was chosen. The parents hired professional room cleaners to clean the children's rooms. It was a brilliant idea. Of course, it was expensive and it seemed somehow wrong that strangers had to be involved, but the results were fantastic. The rooms were spotless. Everyone lived happily ever after.
Now, you might think that this is the end of our fable, but there is more. Every year the room cleaners meet together in exotic places at conferences to learn the latest room cleaning techniques. Experts in the field give lectures such as:
- Measuring Room Cleaning: Are You Getting the Results You Want?
- Room Cleaning Under Impossible Deadlines
- Heuristic Room Cleaning
- Stepwise Improvement of the Room Cleaning Process
- Five Reasons Your Room Cleaning Program May Fail
Each of these conferences contains the obligatory question and answer session in which a panel of experts pontificates on the great issues of the day. Without fail, a new room cleaner will ask this question, "Why don't the children clean their rooms?" What would your response be?
Comments
#1 Submitted by Wolfgang Schneider on Thu, 12/07/2006 - 4:04pm.
Well, I am a professional room cleaner and make a good living with my room cleaning company as long as the kids don't clean their rooms themselves...
#2 Submitted by Jason English on Wed, 12/06/2006 - 11:00pm.
Now that's what I call running all the way with a metaphor!The problem is communication. If the "parents" can come in the room with an open, non-judgmental dialogue, they will be allowed into the room on a constant basis without resentment, so they can spot the behaviors that create messes earlier, before they attract ants and fungus and the like.
#3 Submitted by max doss on Wed, 12/06/2006 - 1:53pm.
I have experienced using many of the options with "kids" but one option that was not discussed was "putting them up for adoption". Using the first article from this StickyLetter can assist with the process. While I would never do this with my own children I do have the option elsewhere and in a competitive market some one is always willing to clean their room the way the company wants it cleaned.
#4 Submitted by Marian Dichev on Wed, 12/06/2006 - 11:24am.
Yes..very interesting indeed. I hope we all face with children who do not need so much persuasion in what is right thing to do. But it is obvious that Parents must do everything possible not to see their wishes done, but to communicate and understand Children. In this dialog they will find best approach to have rooms clean.
#5 Submitted by on Mon, 02/03/2003 - 10:28pm.
I can't get my 'kids' to clean rooms either. I guess it's time for a professional.
#6 Submitted by Andrew Raybould on Wed, 10/24/2001 - 8:22pm.
There's a flaw in the metaphor, rooted in a misperception that pervades much discussion about quality, including within this forum. In software, you cannot, in practice, achieve quality by cleaning up afterwards; you have to do everything you can to prevent creating a mess in the first place - i.e. good design. The 'cleaning up afterwards' approach is like dealing with a hopelessly tangled rope by cutting all the knots and then tying the pieces back together again: you don't end up with anything that you can really trust.
#7 Submitted by Vicky Cleaton on Wed, 10/24/2001 - 10:12am.
But I have it on good authority that cleaning your room will inhibit your creative freedom to make a really impressive mess! :)
#8 Submitted by Laurie Eaton on Tue, 10/23/2001 - 2:28pm.
Sooner or later the kids will have to grow up and clean their own rooms. Professional room cleaners could never keep up with some of the messes kids make. I think that real-life parallels could have been drawn between creating reasonable solutions for getting the rooms cleaned and the code unit tested. This was entertaining but I don't think it offered any realistic tactics. I agree whole-heartedly with the comment that testers are not room-cleaners, but rather room inspectors - lifting the rug, looking under the bed - looking in places the "kids" may not have thought to, or taken the time to look.
#9 Submitted by Jim Heron on Tue, 10/23/2001 - 2:05pm.
My question is how to deal with incorrigible parents? These parents themselves were once children, and many were dirty room offenders themselves. I submit that if parents at least know the value of a clean room, and are willing to invest in this end, then the battle is more than half won. This is no easy task, and is all the more challenging in a company in which software - however important - is but one component of the end product.The real task is in breaking a cycle wherein the grandparents didn't put a high value on a clean room, and thus neither did their children - today's parents. The standards of these parents are status quo. Some lip service is given to the concept of a clean room, but this often results in paltry room-to-cleaner ratios such as 10:1. In such cases, a light feather dusting of a room is all we can hope for. If one considers that many cleaners spend roughly 1/2 their time cleaning and the remainder developing new tools to clean new toys while the children go on playing full time, this already poor ratio becomes all the bleaker. In the end I suppose some parents will learn the value of a clean room through the school of hard knocks, and the refusal of other parents to let their children play with the dirty room kids and their toys. Perhaps that's what it takes for status quo parents and dirty room kids to take notice of the value of a clean room. It's really a matter of evolving the DNA of the process.
#10 Submitted by John Kerr on Tue, 10/23/2001 - 1:53pm.
One of the earlier comments talked about the lack of a 'habit improvement approach' in our industry. I think I've found one - the Personal Software Process (PSP-TM). When I started taking the PSP course from an EDS colleague out in Utah, I was doing it because I wanted to understand what high maturity practices are about. In the process of finishing the first half of the course, I discovered that what Watts was doing was giving us a discipline for ALL our work, not just software development. Testing is built into the PSP. Having people 'clean their room' continuously while they are doing their work means we need a lot fewer 'room cleaners' because the rooms are spotless every time the kids leave them.I guess that's what struck me as ironic about this fable. It reminds us that we act like children a lot of the time, that we rebel against what our parents tell us to do, and fail to display any kind of discipline.I'll also be recommending this web site to my colleagues. This is a great web site. Tell your friends.
#11 Submitted by Subin Eapen on Tue, 10/23/2001 - 12:30pm.
A good analogy. I guess this implies that you need good habits to regularly clean your room, ie. good habits in the real world = good processes in the software world. It's funny that we haven't heard of anyone coming up with a habit improvement model till date :)
#12 Submitted by Jim Lawrence on Tue, 10/23/2001 - 10:06am.
Loved the fable! A good analogy sometimes makes the point better than the facts of the situation can. However, we must remember that these "children" whose rooms we clean are not actually children. At some point, a level of (professional) maturity should awaken these "children" to the importance of cleaning their own rooms - or at least making the attempt to do so. But alas, even the most industrious child will likely not clean their room as well as a professional might, so the cleaning crews will continue to be a necessary tool.
#13 Submitted by Georg Hess on Tue, 10/23/2001 - 9:03am.
I see the problem in the evolution: Which living being cares about cleaning its environment if it isn't necessary for daily surviving ? Children must act against their instinct consciously to clean their environment. In this respect there is cleaning no question of knowledge or motivaton but this one of personal discipline.
#14 Submitted by Robert M Melendez on Mon, 10/22/2001 - 3:14pm.
Curious, I don't consider myself a room cleaner. I'm a room inspector who reports to the parents the problems inthe room. Then the parents must decide when more cleanliness is necessary. I would consider sustaining ormaintenance engineers to be a closer parallel to the fable.Inspection/test can't clean the room by themselves.
#15 Submitted by EdA-qa Mort-ora-y on Mon, 10/22/2001 - 8:22am.
This is an inappropriate comparison and fails to capture a vital aspect: benefit of quality assurance. To use the words of this article, "a clean room" has not in any way been shown to be beneficial to any of the parties involved. I am always a firm believer that a failure for the development team to embrace quality is primarily a failure of the quality department. This type of article does little more than help bolster the reputation of QA professionals as arrogant and believing engineers to be incompetant.
#16 Submitted by Kate Gartner on Wed, 11/01/2000 - 7:14pm.
Loved the fable...intrigued by those naughty children who don't clean their rooms and so hopeful the fable would end with an answer instead of a question. The kid in me says hey - the room is still functional, the mess doesn't alter the purpose of the room, so what's the big deal ?
#17 Submitted by on Fri, 10/20/2000 - 11:57am.
1) The children are not rewarded for cleaning their rooms, 2) The frenetic behavior that makes the room messy is tolerated by the parents (who seem somehow not to see the connection between the frenetic behavior and the messiness), and 3) The children chafe at any restrictions or oversight of their frenetic behavior.Until the children internalize the necessity of clean rooms, or at least the importance of more organized behavior, the rooms will stay messy, and we room-cleaners will: a) continue to complain about the mess, and 2) continue to earn a living cleaning rooms.
#18 Submitted by Bret Pettichord on Thu, 10/19/2000 - 11:20pm.
My room is me and i am it. My room is where i like to be and it looks like all my dreams.
#19 Submitted by Larry Martel on Tue, 10/24/2000 - 6:17pm.
How true. The fable holds true to any activity that isn't "fun" - all activities (ISO/CMM) that ensure there will be a quality output. Thing here that is pure fiction is that in real life the children can't be replaced, but in real life those professionals could eventually replace them. If that threat isn't there, what's the value proposition to the kids to perform the activity? Then again in our world of full employement for technology workers, maybe that isn't the threat that would get them to do it.
#20 Submitted by on Tue, 10/24/2000 - 12:17pm.
Life is full of parallels. Messy rooms like messy code is a function of wanting things we don't need. If our children had fewer things, they would take more care of them, if we took out unneed bells and whistles, the remaining code would be more important. When is the last time you used more than 10 % of the features in your word processor??? Usually because your afraid of the "blue screen of death" from some seldom used feature that isn't clean.
#21 Submitted by Lisa Crispin on Mon, 10/23/2000 - 9:30pm.
We'd clean our rooms if cleaning our rooms was more fun than NOT cleaning our rooms. To quote from Kent Beck's book "Extreme Programming Explained": "Programming when you have the tests is more fun than programming when you don't. You code with so much more confidence. YOu never have to entertain those nagging thoughts of 'Well, this is the right thing to do right now, but I wonder what I broke'." It took a few weeks to get them in the habit, but our developers are sold on unit tests now and as the tester, I now identify with parents of neat and tidy children.
#22 Submitted by Sherry Chupka on Thu, 10/19/2000 - 1:18pm.
Dear New Room Cleaners,I have spoken with the children and it seems they do not enjoy cleaning their room. They feel this task is a waste of their time and they have more important things to do. They feel cleaning is a waste of time, especially if someone else will do the job for them.We can't expect the rooms to stay clean. Keep a notebook containing past locations of garbage; you're likely to find it there again.Some children revel in filth and actually enjoy creating it. Beware of these children, since they are prone to fits of rage at the idea of someone finding fault with any type of filth.Most children just are so engrossed in details that they just don't have time to recognize the disarray that surrounds them.I have also seen children who try to reason their way around having to change the location of an item in their room. We have to make sure their room is up to spec. Provide them with references to outside sources, this will help them to see the light.Children who refuse to redecorate may also benefit from reference to outside sources.
#23 Submitted by sridhar chakravar... on Thu, 10/19/2000 - 4:44am.
Childern should be left alone to experiment,learn and create new things and thus contribute in a great way to the household.And it is a very good idea to have professional house cleaners,they will do a fantastic job,particularly with trash disposal,which the kids love to hang on to ,for some strange reasons known to themselves.
#24 Submitted by Balaji Iyer on Wed, 10/18/2000 - 8:22pm.
I can afford to compromise the cleanliness of my room for I alone live there .Can I afford to act the same way in case of a billion $ software and screw up my colleague's life as well?
#25 Submitted by annaa on Wed, 10/18/2000 - 4:21pm.
It's sure true that a lot of adults seem like overgrown children. Why don't most kids clean their rooms? What's in it for them? They don't see a return value worth the effort - the consequences to them don't warrant the work of prevention. (And it means I have a job...)
#26 Submitted by JayneLowe on Wed, 10/18/2000 - 12:30pm.
(The child in me speaking) My room is mine to live and sleep in - I'm happy with it the way it is. It's strange though - I don't mind helping my friends to tidy their rooms - somehow it's different ...
#27 Submitted by Shazina Hashmi on Wed, 10/18/2000 - 6:10am.
The important thing is room has to be cleaned, what matters is realizing when to do and convincing others.
#28 Submitted by on Mon, 10/16/2000 - 1:46pm.
Funny thing about fables ... they can be so true!! Emailed the article to several of my testing friends to get their week off to a good start!