Secrets of Consulting

Part of the reason why it is so fragmented is that testing was pushed heavily by people who were all for more testing, while a lot of practical knowledge was locked up in the heads of people who spent more time being pragmatic and less being dogmatic. To the extent that pragmatism didn't support testing dogma, therefore, it got left in isolated pieces and didn't become part of the dialog.

If you listen to Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Martin Fowler and so on, you could be pardoned for the impression that unit testing is an idea invented by Kent Beck in 1997 with JUnit, that has taken the world by storm since.

That's complete and utter BS. Perl 5.0, released in 1994, came with Test.pm, which made it easy to write tests. Better yet, when you installed from CPAN it would BY DEFAULT run the unit test suite to be sure that your environment worked as expected. (This is a critical idea that I wish had been adopted by other repositories...)

This was Larry Wall encouraging people to follow the practices that he did. Perl 1.0, released in 1987, came with a unit test suite that ran by default before you installed it. In fact he knew the technique because he'd adopted it with his best known previous program, rn. And he knew to do that because the practice was already accepted.

Of course the idea was not original to him. See http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-we-used-to-do-unit-testing.html for the reminiscences of someone who was doing unit testing back in the…

Jerry Weinberg has an essay on fads in computer programming[1]. Basically, it's written such that you can swap in whatever today's hottest fad is, and the article still makes sense (it was originally written for Structured Programming, but OO Programing, Agile Development, Node.js, et al would fit well within it).

One of his conclusions is that the organizations that are likely to succeed with the latest whiz-bang technologies are also the ones who were most likely to succeed without them. Sure, what's new can be better, but it's hardly sufficient.

Based on my experience, I would agree, and so I think you're right. With the exception of this being specific to "programmers these days". I think our industry has always been plagued by this trend. It's just that now, with the internet, the stories have a longer reach.

[1] http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2011/06/beyond-agile-programming.html

Gerald Weinberg recently said something very interesting about non-makers and meetings:

"When I walk a client's corridors, I frequently meet people on their way to meetings. Although these same people have told me that meetings are boring, they often seem excited when they're on their way to one. Why?

"... what these meetings are doing is playing out an emotional drama—conflict, blaming, flirting, one-upsmanship, random outbursts, anger, and so forth. For these happy people heading for meetings, it's those the soap-opera aspects of meetings are the most exciting parts of their jobs."

http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-we-love-and-hate-meetings.html

Many thanks for the detailed answer!

How do you know when to call it quits? How do you know when people are not aligned or honest, or that you are not right for the team, or when the team is not right for the client/project?

How much time is normal for a team/project to get its bearings? (It depends, I know...)

For anyone else who had no idea who was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg (also known as Jerry Weinberg) also his blog is still online https://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2012/09/agile-and-definition-of-quality.html

Gerald maintained a blog, mainly as a front for the books he wrote, for a year before he passed away: https://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com

I like these posts better:

https://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2018/07/some-advice-on-advice.html

https://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2018/06/why-would-anyone-want-to-live-past.html

https://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2018/04/stumbles-for-new-leaders-and-managers.html

He did show up once on news.yc: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=geraldmweinberg