Playing in the Mud

Many parents, at times this one included, become obsessed with ensuring that your kids are clean.  We do whatever we can to prevent them from getting dirty - cover our kids with clothes that prevent anything dirty from touching their skin, keep them out of mud and dirt, have a constant supply of hand sanitizer nearby, hose them off if they do manage to get something on them... and they still manage to find ways to get dirt on them!!

When they get food on their faces while eating we chastise them and wipe it away.  When a child encounters a mud puddle, their first reaction is to jump into it... a parent's is to react in horror and haul the kid away to be cleaned.

We worry about our children playing in public sandboxes because we don't know who or what has been playing in there before them!

IT'S A DIRTY WORLD, AND WE HAVE TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM IT!!

Or do we?

Coaching Point
Put simply, humans need to be dirty. We literally need to have bacteria on our skin in order to be healthy. All of the hand-washing and sanitizer we foist upon our children is meant well, but in reality we're actually doing as much long-term harm as we are short-term good. The fact is that we as a species evolved in a dirty environment - we didn't have soap or hand sanitizer 50,000 years ago!

The same type of side effects occur when a software development team doesn't work in an environment where they're allowed to get dirty. They aren't allowed to experiment. They aren't allowed to fail in small ways that allow the team to learn as they move along. Everything has to be perfect the first time, or it's considered a complete failure.

So, how well does that approach work? What are the side effects of sanitizing the development environment to remove all the dirt? Innovation is stifled. Code becomes riddled with Technical Debt because there is fear of making the changes required to keep it clean. Eventually, it costs an increasing amount of time and thus money to maintain and extend the code and ultimately a complete rewrite is required.

Wouldn't it be less expensive and much more effective to allow teams to play in the dirt and find ways to improve the software in smaller ways over time? Yes, there will be occasions where the small experiments won't work. Yes, there is a risk that some of the small changes will break other code. But, like the long term effect of allowing a child's immune system to be exposed to staph bacteria early in life, the rewards of keeping the code fresh and clean enough far outweigh these risks.

So, paradoxically, if people are empowered to get dirty, cleaner code, a better product and a more productive team will result.