Posted by Viktor Grgic mid-afternoon: July 14th, 2006
Technical experts are often hired to fix some problem which hasn’t been solved after spending huge amounts of time and money. An example could be trying to integrate legacy code with an object-oriented environment. The expert will typically try to address all mentioned problems. He uses his knowledge and experience to approach the problem in the most effective way. Experienced experts have many possible solutions and they choose the best one.
Wouldn’t be much easier and cheaper for everyone if the first step in every single approach would be to ask: “How do we make this problem disappear?”. It’s funny to find out that almost everyone involved already knows the answer, but those who considered it didn’t have the courage to propose it. Why? It’s often because too much money is already spent on a problem which shouldn’t be there in the first place, especially by the people involved. This is maybe the main reason why external audits are so important.
This happens quite often in J2EE world. For instance a less experienced technical team is asked to write use-cases. The lead developer / architect decides to develop a “state-of-the-art” framework for all future problems, not just this one, just in case someone should be needing it. This team will have one certainty: the more you want, the more problems you will generate, until you spend lots of effort on technical problems that weren’t even requested by the customer…
