Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If something is really bad, it is probably broken, not just really bad. Remedies are available.

I once knew a person at work who hated vegetables. He knew, however, that he should eat some now and then because, as everyone will tell you, vegetables “are good for you.” So, one day he brought in some vegetables in a container for lunch. He heated them in the microwave and proceeded to eat them.

Everyone else in the office could tell that the vegetables in the container were rotten. The odor was awful. He, however, hating the taste of any vegetable concluded that these really bad tasting vegetables were just…you know, vegetables that were awful. It never occurred to him that the vegetables were broken.

Years ago, I was involved in comparing several pieces of software to see which would work best for us. Some of the software performed, well, really bad. It took minutes to type a sentence. Minutes to save a one-paragraph document. On and on, just really bad.

In both cases—the vegetables and the software under test—the system was really bad because it was broken. There was a reason why it was really bad, and it could be corrected so that it was, well, not so really bad anymore.

Most systems are produced by pretty smart persons. Those systems aren’t really bad. They may not be as good as some other systems, but really bad is rare. In most cases, really bad means something is broken. It can be remedied so that the system is no longer really bad.

Consider the repair before judging.