Comments on: Forced compliance is an obstruction to discipline

By: In defense of compliance

In defense of compliance — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:42:31 +0000

[...] second is a post by Aslam Khan entitled Forced compliance is an obstruction to discipline. I respect him a lot for his forceful call for self-discipline in development, and I don’t [...]

By: Claudio Perrone

Claudio Perrone — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:09:23 +0000

Hi Aslam,
your examples of self discipline, like “not check in code that is broken” is a rule that, even if automatically enforced, would have no impact in your daily operation as diligent developer.
Not all compliance is bad. The rule above, if enforced, could help in a team as traffic lights help cars moving in a crossroad.

Frankly, it is hard to just rely to self-disciplined common sense when most of our industry is nonsensical (giving plenty of Dilbert material at every corner).

I think that the real problem lies in how standards and guidelines are conceived and maintained within an organization, however.
Once written, all too often these rules become the indisputable and immutable law. They may just as well be written in stone.

I recently learned a lesson from the continuous improvement in Toyota (with the understanding that software development is different from manufacturing, so take everything with grain of salt), which roughly says (i’m translating from my memory, not Japanese ):

“A standard/rule/guideline is our understanding of the best way to do things right know. The moment it is written, it is there to be challenged and will be replaced as soon as better way is found.”

This may or may not apply in software development since rules are rarely context free and software has a lot of variability. In other words, a prescriptive law that takes in account all the possible variations would be complex or impossible to write, so, (hint-hint) if you are “mature enough”, you would rather follow principles

By: Aslam

Aslam — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:16:59 +0000

@Herman
Exactly! Because of the forced compliance to CheckStyle, you do the bare minimum to get a “clean” build but that style of governance blocks the opportunity for accepting the higher responsibility of writing better code.

Nice illustration. I like it a lot!

By: Herman

Herman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:13:34 +0000

You need self discipline in order to write good quality code.
The project with the most detailed defined and enforced CheckStyle templates that I have come across at a client, is also the project where there is the most serious code quality issues, even though all the code adheres to the CheckStyle templates…