Software Engineering

Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases

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William Edwards Deming was sent to Japan in the early 1950’s and propagated his ideas about quality control and production process throughout Japanese industry.

There’s a wealth of wisdom in Deming’s work, albeit much of it industrially focused, but I’m particularly fond of his “Seven Deadly Diseases” of management (with my comments):

  1. Lack of constancy of purpose
    • It’s clear that having some core concepts about what you are trying to do is helpful… simple, effective statements about what’s important to your company, what your company does, and perhaps what your department’s role is in helping to fulfill the company’s purpose.
  2. Emphasis on short-term profits
    • Encourages what Bob Lutz describes as what-can-we-get-away-with thinking.
  3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
    • These systems reward results rather than process-improvement, which can be counter-productive, and thereby encourage workers to maintain the status quo rather than innovate… their goal is to ‘get it done’ rather than to improve how they do so.
  4. Mobility of management
    • Too much ‘reorganization’ interrupts and breaks process improvement initiatives. Probably happens so much because of #3.
  5. Running a company on visible figures alone
    • You cannot measure everything, but must nonetheless do things you think need to be done. Too many times are we told not to do something if you can’t show me it will be valuable.
  6. Excessive medical costs
    • A very interesting observation made over 60 years ago
  7. Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
    • Maybe not so relevant to the software industry.

It’s also worth mentioning a few other items from “A Lesser Category of Obstacles”:

  1. Neglecting long-range planning.
    • I’m a little torn on this.  In software, too much long-term planning can be a waste of time, but you certainly can’t neglect it entirely.
  2. Relying on technology to solve problems
    • I see this all the time. Figure out your problems first please… I beg you… before you start buying software you think will solve it for you… it won’t.
  3. Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
  4. Excuses, such as “our problems are different”.
  5. Placing blame on workforces who are only responsible for 15% of mistakes where the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of the unintended consequences.
  6. Relying on quality inspection rather than improving product quality.
    • Relying on software testing rather than changing how we build the software in the first place.

I’m often drawn back to these little pearls of wisdom and I continue to be amazed at the prevalence of many of them throughout the industry. Keep them in mind while you are trying to steer your own efforts.

Top 5 logical fallacies used in technical debates

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I’m an engineer, so I get in a lot of debates. I get in lots of debates on a wide variety of other topics as well. I can certainly come across as argumentative, but all I’m really seeking is a reasonable debate between valid arguments.

What I often get, instead, are arguments that are really based on nothing. I think it’s important for people in our field to understand the more common logical fallacies so they can learn when to recognize them being used… and avoid using them themselves.

#5: Slippery Slope

This is a form of ‘probability fallacy’… i.e. because X has happened 10 times in the past, it is very likely to happen in the future. This, statistically, is false. If I flip a coin 10 times and get heads, it’s still 50/50 to get heads the eleventh time.

It’s hard to convince people that this isn’t a good argument, but it isn’t. In some cases, it’s an argument about the failings of human nature. But I still think it’s just lazy… tell me why it’s a bad idea rather than convince me that, at some point in the future, it will cause bad things to happen. I am sometimes guilty of this one myself.

Example: But it we add that property to the class to solve that problem, what stops us from adding other properties? Eventually, the class will have 1000 properties!

#4: Appeal to the Masses

Also known as an ad populum argument. Just because 10 ba-jillion people do it doesn’t mean it’s right. We used to bleed people to cure diseases… that didn’t make it right. Tell me what’s good about your solution. What are it’s pros and cons? I don’t care… at all… how many people think it’s a good idea.

Example:  But everyone is using Java applets on their web pages, so we should be doing that also!

#3: Appeal to Authority

Very, very common in this internet age to become victim to this one because authority is granted upon the most random of internet characters. Having a blog does not make you an authority, in any case, and it certainly isn’t a valid argument to point to anyone to validate your solution. If you want to plagiarize that person’s arguments to make your case, that’s fine… but please don’t tell me you’re right because some guy said so.

Example:  But Scott Hanselman says that everybody should be using NuGet for everything!

#2: Straw Man

This one is used a lot and it’s good to be able to spot it when it happens. Someone takes your side of the argument, misrepresents it in the most gross way possible in order to beat it about the head and shoulders like a birthday pinata.

Example: So you want to take all that data, jam thousands of rows in the database and then just do it all with stored procedures?!? Um, no… not what I said at all.

#1: Ad Hominem

This happens all the time. Basically attacking the debater rather than the idea. This is usually a desperation move or commonly used by someone unaccustomed to defending their positions. Often takes the form of Appeal to Motive…. attacking the debater by questioning their motives.

Example:  You don’t like this solution because you just don’t understand it (because, presumably, I am an idiot). You just want to do it that way because it’s less work for you and more work for me (appeal to motive).

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I think it’s good for people to know debating skills and what makes for a good argument, and what doesn’t. A good read of Robert’s Rules of Order would be nice also!

Innovation not Regurgitation

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Given the rapid growth of the internet as an information resource… and our seemingly inherent human treatment of the written word as gospel… it is very easy for my fellow engineers to read a single blog entry and conclude that ‘we should be doing that!’

… and I think that’s a very serious problem.

To make matters worse, the ever increasing number of tools and frameworks leads to a dangerous tendency to reduce our engineering responsibility to ‘toolbox assembly’.  We’ll use Tool A for this and Tool B for that and we’ll house that all in Framework C… my work is done here!

I remember sitting in a meeting a few years ago and asking “when did we get so afraid to write our own code?”

Ultimately, I’m interested in ideas… using tools and contemplating thoughts from internet blogs are useful endeavors… but they shouldn’t replace our basic creative function as engineers.

Give me innovation not regurgitation!