I fixed a bug today – a bug that was introduced because a chunk of code was depending on side effects of another piece of code to work properly. Depending on whether you’re ever worked directly with a computer language, this may be a subtle transgression, but the problem is distinct and real, and here’s the best part — if you learn why this is a problem, you’ll understand where this flawed thinking bites you in everyday business decisions, too.
So let’s back up and look at a non-programming example. Let’s say you go in to see you doctor because you’re feeling under the weather. The doctor runs some tests and sees that your white blood cell count is higher than expected. A good doctor would know very well that there are lots of reasons this can happen, but someone a little less disciplined who’s sitting at home playing “House, the Home Game” might shout out, “it’s cancer!” before really having any evidence to support their crackpot theory.
Posted on February 8th, 2008 under .Net Development. Tags: Joel Spolsky, Root Cause Analysis. View Comments