The Rush

The Rush

Posted by Uncle Bob on Friday, June 26, 2009

There’s nothing like the feeling of achievement when you get a complex software system working. It’s the feeling of the hunter making a hard fought kill. By the sheer power of your intellect you have imposed your will upon inanimate nature, and forced it to do your bidding. You feel the rush of power, the satisfaction of victory. You are the master!

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that you’ve made a mess of things along the way.

This is inevitable. It takes a great deal of focus and endurance to get a system working just right. While you are consumed by that focus, you have little room for niceties like small functions, nice names, decoupling, and cleanliness.

My apprentice and I just finished achieving a major milestone in FitNesse. It used to be that each new release of FitNesse was contained in a zip file that had all the files and directories laid out just perfectly. This is great for a brand new installation, but doesn’t work so well when you are upgrading. What we managed to get working last night was the ability for FitNesse to self-install from it’s jar file. Now, whether you are installing for the first time, or just upgrading, FitNesse will install itself into your environment appropriately.

If you’ve ever written a self-install like this, you know there are lots of niggling little details to attend to. While the problem is conceptually simple, the realization is a maze of complexity.

Last night, with dinner waiting on the table and getting cold, we got the last little problem licked, and saw the whole self-installation work as we wanted. We congratulated each other with a high-five, and then went upstairs to eat a well-deserved meal. Later that evening I went down to the office and checked in the code.

This morning I woke up, and while in the shower, I realized that we had a lot of work left to do. We need to go back over all that code and clean it up. I’m sure we left a swath of detritus while on the hunt.

The rush of victory should never be confused with the cold and crystalline concept of done. Once you get your systems to work, you still have to go back and clean up the wreckage left behind by the victorious battle. You are not done until the victorious code has been cleaned, polished, and oiled.

Comments