Continuous Learning

by Yogi

Triage, originated in the battlefield medicine, is a time honored technique for determine the priorities for bug fixing in the software industry. As Steve Pavlina puts it succinctly in his article Triage, all of us only have so much time on our hand, and in order for us to gain the most out of our time, we need to ensure that we handle only the vital tasks. Some of these vital tasks may not look urgent, but without our attention and effort, it will never come to fruition. The goal of triage is therefore to ensure that we prioritize efforts that will give us the biggest bang for the buck. I believe most of us in the software industry can readily agree to such assessment, except I am a bit puzzled with the declarations that these vital tasks actually are not urgent, because in software, these tasks are.

A generic approach to classify the bugs is to rank their severities, with severity 1 (sev 1) being the highest. Sev 1 bugs generally cause the system to malfunction, crash, causing loss of data, or even lives if the software manages something critical such as heart regulation, airplanes, etc. There is no question that these bugs deserve the highest attentions from us. Sev 2 bugs generally are defects at lesser magnitude - the system is still not fully functioning, but the impact is less drastic, Keep reading →

We all have experienced such situation before - looking for the perfect timing to do something. Well - when was the last time that you found the perfect timing?

“Oh - I will take care of that later”.

“There wasn’t a right moment for me to ask her out”.

“The market just crashed, and this is not the right time to strike out on my own”.

Either we have said them ourselves or we have heard someone saying them. And sometimes others are not making things better by giving you the same advice. For some reason, timing is a big deal for us. Somewhere in our subconscious, we believe that if we have the right timing, things will all just work out. If the market is just right, we can catch the wave all the way to stardom. But if the timing is wrong, then the chance for our success is zilch. As such, it’s clear that we believe external forces truly control our destiny.

Of course, sometimes such behaviors might be justified. Keep reading →