One of the things that bothers me a great deal about software development is that it is Sisyphean. We spend a lot of time taking that boulder and rolling it back up the hill. When we get to the top of the hill, we see lots of boulders at the bottom and some other poor souls pushing them to the top of the hill again.
Part of this is entropy. Systems do tend become disordered over time. But the terrible truth of software development is that software doesn't become disordered by itself, it becomes disordered because we touch it. We change the code and the changes can be good or they can be bad. It requires constant effort to keep a code base clean. But, like the boulders, we slide. Sometimes we don't even know that we are doing it. A while back, I met a manager who is part of an organization that keeps detailed records about the state of their code and he said that often they can see cases where developers were letting some cruft build up but they weren't aware of it because the code remained understandable to them. It was a variant of the 'boiled frog syndrome.'
In the end, we're all human. We can look at ourselves and consider ourselves flawed because of the mistakes we've made, or we can flip things around and look at the environment and see what we can do to make things easier.
I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a while, it really came home to me the other day with this article.
Reseachers have determined that if you are a convict who wants a favorable outcome in a parole hearing, you are much better off if your hearing is after lunch. It doesn't seem to matter who the judge is, the severity of the crime, or the amount of incarceration. Prisoners were granted parole 65% of the time right after lunch with the amount of time dwindling toward zero at the end of the day.
This is a very sobering thought for people want to see themselves and others as entirely self-determined rational actors.
I don't know what the outcome will be (if any) for the legal profession, but they do have a chance to address the problem by altering their processes and environment. It makes me wonder what we're missing and whether we can do the same.
