Fear

I've had to confront my fears in adapting XP. My final conclusion was that I was just going to be uncomfortable, but I was willing to wear that for the sake of improvement. I've been set in my (bad habit) ways and change for the better was going to feel uneasy, emotionally. But intellectually, I can see the benefits of giving up the old ways.

Once I had surrendered to being uncomfortable, everything got comfortable. Weird how the pysche works. The flip side of this, is that I now get to watch people at work hit their fears and discomfort areas.

Just before the X-mas break, we were discussing amongst the developers how things were going to work. I had just started reading Test Driven Development and getting an even better feeling for how Simple Design really works. We've got User Stories for our project, but everyone knows that the content of the stories does not make a complete application on the other end. There is some uncertainty of business value for different document management systems that will be used by the application. And this is were the discussion turned to in light of Simple Design.

We need persistent data in regards to sets of documents. We do not currently have stories for the document management systems. Therefore, the simple solution would be to just store documents in a directory. The persistent data? Just write it out to a flat file in the same directory. I think everyone was on the same page up to this point.

One of the developers then suggested that when we move to a document management system that supports custom properties, we move the contents of the flat file to the custom properties. I challenged this, because it already works in a flat file. If something already works and it satisfies the customer's functionality, there is no need to change it (unless you are refactoring and I can't see a flat file being sucked into a database as a valid refactoring, at least for this project).

So, here comes the fear. Our company is full of technically savvy people and this project is an internal project. Developer: "What do we say when we are questioned as to why we aren't using the capabilities of the document management system?" Can you smell the fear? Probably not, as I'm a programmer and not a writer, but let me tell you it was obvious that we had struck a big wide vein of fear at that point.

My response was to say, "Tell them to talk to me. XP is about simplicity. If we don't have a business value for moving the persistent state, there is no need to do it. It's more time and more time means less money." (very paraphrased) Basically, I tried to say that's my responsibility and I'll wear that decision.

Fear is all around some times. You just need to sniff it out. So while courage is something to aim for, fear is some times hiding and not so obvious. As is Simple Design. To reach the goals, I'm keeping my eye out for the opposite bits creeping in.