Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Cutting With the Grain

Cutting with the Grain is an interesting article by Kent Beck, Joseph Leddy, and William Wake.

I could definitely relate to what it was talking about, both from personal experience and from feedback on the Suneido forum.

A couple of other programmers in my company are currently working on a feature that seems to be a neverending source of complications. Definitely going against the grain. But do you abandon it or push ahead? If you push ahead, are you going to end up with something ugly? (It wouldn't be the first time.)

Suneido can make certain projects wonderfully simple. But sometimes people seem determined to make it do something it was never designed to do. Not surprisingly, it's very difficult and I can't help them much. Sometimes they persevere and Suneido gains new abilities. Other times they give up and disappear, no doubt with a negative opinion of Suneido. I try to lead them onto the path of least resistance, into "cutting with the grain", but it doesn't always work.

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