Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt in their book The Pragmatic Programmer make the devil and the angel play interesting roles by making them sit on the programmer's shoulder and letting them give him advice which the reader can choose to follow or ignore while working on real life projects.
As you would expect, almost invariably, the devil's advice represents the thinking of an immature, in-experienced programmer. Keep listening to the devil's advice and you can slowly lead your project into the state of uncontrolled chaos. Take this advice for instance:
On the other hand the Angel represents the thoughtful, self disciplined, matured and pragmatic developer, making your life a little difficult but your projects much more rewarding and successful:
Anyone who has been involved with even one single complex project and has got-it-done successfully, knows that software development is like fighting a war with multiple enemies (time, complexity, bad-communication and many others) hidden and attacking from multiple directions and fronts. Subtle chaos and confusion are a part of the game in our business.
So solider, you've worked hard for years; your god's have smiled on you and turned you into a one-man-army. You've developed a strong armor of thick skin and have carried with you, in your arsenal, weapons like simplicity, prioritization, quick iterations and the like. You have earned your client's trust and they walk with you as allies. You are proud of the small yet gallant army of warriors that walks with you and you are highly motivated to win your wars on as many fronts as possible.
But wait! You forgot to carry with you two very important members of your team. The Symbolic Angel and The Symbolic Devil from Venkat and Andy's book.
That's right. You heard me. You need them both. Let the angel lead you in the right direction but don't leave the devil behind. As you grow and mature, you learn to let your symbolic angel mingle and work with your symbolic devil. Growth is all about your angel learning and getting used to channeling your devil's ideas in the right direction.
The real trick is to empower your angel so strongly that she cannot be affected by the devil. At the same time, let her use the devil's obsessive compulsive advices for the good of your project.
I've had experiences of the Angel working on the Devil's advice and adding her own magical touch to produce some outstanding results.
Based on the devil's advice of bulldozing the entire project and starting fresh and the angel's magical touch on that advice, the Turkish proverb - “No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn back.” was changed to “No Matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, find the shortest, safest and smartest way to the right road.” - you can see my symbolic angel and my symbolic devil working together and coming to this pragmatic middle path in one of my older posts.
Dave Winkler has his symbolic devil telling him that all software he builds is shitty and he might as well write some shitty code. But his angel tames his devil with practical pragmatic advice:
| Software is a process, it's never finished, it's always evolving. That's its nature. We know our software sucks. But it's shipping! Next time we'll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that's perfect is one you're dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it's a process. We'll make it less shitty. Just watch! |
The Devil from Venkat's And Andy's book also advices:
This is by far the most lethal advice that can turn your project into a dirty political campaign and a direct quest for failure. However, with a little bit of magic which comes from the Angel's touch, we make this same advice work for our build management process.
At work when a build breaks, we find the culprit. Just to get the kick out of this whole thing, we quite literally call the exercise - 'finding the culprit'. Once the culprit is found, he gets an instant 'promotion' and becomes a 'build manager'. As a build manager he's supposed to fire three builds a day and baby-sit the build till someone else breaks it.
At one point we had jokes and bets going on who the next 'build manager' was going to be. We've also considered printing special balloons which have 'build manager' labeled on them so that we can stick them off the cubical of the current build manager.
We like to add a little bit of spice and fun to our build process and the devil's advice blended with the angel's magical touch does wonders! As funny as it may sound, every time we've introduced this technique, we have seen the number of build breaks go down tremendously.
Let there be pair programming between your symbolic angel and your symbolic devil. Let your devil get influenced by the good company of your angel.
Initially of course, your symbolic devil will hate it; but once tamed and under your angel's influence, he can end up giving you some pretty wacky and out of the box ideas!
To begin with you'll have to be really careful. If he does nothing else, as he begins to walk down with your troops, your devil will just act as a measure of what-not-to-do. As you continue to let him mingle with your angel and be influenced under her company, he will come up with ideas which can work wonders if they get your angel's blessing and magic touch.
Dear readers and fellow programmers, are you headed for your next big war with your army, your allies and your arsenal? Don't leave your symbolic angel and your symbolic devil behind. Your devil might be a big fat opinionated jerk but if tamed properly by your angel, you can still use him to your own advantage and kick some serious ass in your next big war.
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