Natural Order Development

Honestly I am getting real tired of dealing with developers who seem to feel the need to rebel against any change in their thinking process. I have no problem taking classes, seeing something I haven't tried before and if I feel it might be helpful being willing to give it a solid try for a few cycles. And I fully admit it that I am an unabashed process freak.

And yet I am left with my jaw hanging open by people in my teams that state evangelizing against any suggestion to try something new. Every time I suggest we try something new I get the tired old "we don't need to fix what isn't broken" or worse "that smells like waterfall." Every time someone suggests something like modeling a problem, doing a domain analysis or heaven forbid any kind of diagram on paper (white boards are OK) people put their hands over their ears and start chanting "no waterfall, no waterfall." This gets annoying after a while.

You can call me lazy (I prefer "efficient".) I deplore doing boring and mundane things over and over again because someone is too lazy to see that it could and should be handled by a process. To me, even a simple process like the following is worth its weight in gold for the time it saves:

1. See bug
2. write test -- or fix test
3. run test, see test fail
4. fix code
5. run test, see test pass

I see developers (and am regularly pushed to do this myself) who will go in and find point solutions to a bug, not stepping back a notch or "up a level" to see if it is more "structural" first. I often say "you can master the details by doing a little modeling." I really have a problem with point solutions when the cause is almost always because the original design was not well thought out. Hours and days of my life (and other team mates) can be saved (or even better redirected to more interesting issues) if the higher level solutions to bugs are found and addressed. Isn't that what engineering is supposed to be about?

I'm not sure a process that doesn't involve someone in the loop who is able to spot that these "better ways" exists. You just can't escape the value of smart folks on the team that have been paying attention.