If human bodies developed the way programmers write their code !

Picked the following from Reinvent. Great article.

Growing Pains!

If the human bodies developed the way many programmers write their programs, the world would have been a far more interesting place to live in.

Assuming average human life spans 80 years, you would see the left leg growing for almost ten years.

Once the left leg grew completely, the right leg would start showing up.

After about 20 years or so, it would abdomen’s turn to grow. (I met a very close friend of mine yesterday, who is about 60% complete, and his arms have just started showing up.)

After the entire left leg grows, the testing would begin and then the leg might have to shrink a little bit to be totally bug-free.

Interesting world to live in, isn't it?

That's how many programmers treat the code that they write. And that's the reason very soon programmers find that their code-base has become very complex, tracking bugs becomes all the more difficult and they totally lose control of their own application. The result is – S_ _ _

So, how do you understand your own “code” [human] body?

The human body, at whatever stage of development it is, is perfect, complete and fully functional. New features get added as the body grows, but at whatever stage it is, the body is complete in itself.

That is the reason bugs in human bodies are relatively easy to diagnose and fix. And, that's why new features show up with ease, almost naturally.

That is what you could do to make your software development process easy and manageable.

At any point of time, ensure that whatever code-base exists is perfect, complete and fully functional.

Then, you add some more functionality. And you ensure again that whatever has been added is perfect, complete and fully functional.

At every step, you are confident that your code works perfectly well.

At every step, you would be confident that whatever you have just added works perfectly well.

And if something has gone wrong, you will know precisely where to look for errors.

The most striking result of this would be—at every step you would feel great about yourself and your code.

The next time you type in 200 lines of code before compiling, executing or thoroughly testing—remember that “interesting world”, where, at your present age, you had two legs working fully developed and the "implementation" of the abdomen would be just about to begin.

Ensure that you are in control of your code right from the first line of code that you write. And then, add some more code and again ensure that you are in control again. That will save you several hours of unnecessary debugging.

That will be enjoyable. That will be confidence building.