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Constant Progress, No Quagmires
By Eric Gross | August 2, 2007
I am frequently involved with customers who are struggling incredibly hard with a project they are trying to complete. Once part of the project stalls, there are two options - try harder to move forward or try to find a way around the obstacle. Customers push their vendors to fix the issue at hand - sometimes with difficulty getting all the parties on the same page to the point of exhaustion. It can take weeks to solve problems involving a lot of systems, as is common with most database problems. Management eventually gets fed up with the delays, and all hell can break loose. All too often there are alternative solutions shrouded in the lack of acceptance and research.
The scientific method is undervalued & underused.
Our lives are complicated enough as it is. Sometimes we forget about incremental progress and testing. How can we make it all work? We need to recall our technical roots. From the start, the foundation of our information technology has been logic and science. The opposite of these characteristics is irrationality. The scientific method dictates that we create a hypothesis which can be tested repeatedly - all the while tracking the results and confirming that our predicted results materialize. When something doesn’t work as we planned it is imperative that we shake the foundations leading up to that decision to see if anything falls out given the current perspective. Solving problems can be essential, but sometimes you can wait for someone else to solve it by avoiding it.
Scientific progress and testing is critical for database work - not only are databases important but they are complex. Systems need to be created so that it can be recreated over and over until it works every time. Not only must the process as a whole work reliably, but also each step must be validated to have been completed successfully by confirming that all expected results actually exist.
Topics: Consistency, Efficiency, Repeatability
August 3rd, 2007 at 3:43 pm
The scientific method indeed! Isn’t the classical definition of insanity “following the same process repeatedly while expecting different outcomes”?