Escaping the Cornfield

Imagine a traveller lost in a dense cornfield. The traveller knows their ultimate destination: the mountains on the horizon. Just beyond the cornfield, hidden by the dense vegetation, runs a highway that leads directly there.

The problem is not one of effort but one of direction. No matter which direction the traveller chooses there is going to be hard work wading through plants. To get to the mountain efficiently, the traveller needs to head towards the road and escape the cornfield.

The obvious direction, straight towards the mountain, makes that effort translate directly into progress, but it is not the shortest path. The shortest path requires choosing a lateral direction relative to the objective. The shortest path, initially, feels like a lot of effort for little or no gain, but it leads to a clear path requiring less effort for the remainder of the journey.

Software Development is Navigating a Cornfield

And so it is with software development. The desired functionality is the “mountain”. The problems to be solved and the lines of code to be written are the “cornfield”. The things which speed us up are the “highway”.

To get to the “highway” we Tidy First ‒ we ask ourselves “what would make this change easy?”. The answer to that question will involve reorganizing existing code. That work to organize existing code is the short path out of the corn and onto the highway. In practice this could mean introducing better abstractions, renaming symbols, or extracting smaller functions.

Expanding the Analogy

There’s a few other ways we can use this cornfield analogy that are helpful for guiding our approach to software development.

Agree on the Mountain ‒ Do we understand the problem? Does the solution actually align with the objective? If not, chances are we will be spending more time in the cornfield than we hoped. Get clear on requirements first otherwise effort will be in vain.

Choose the Right Highway ‒ Have we chosen a highway which is actually going to lead us to the right destination? Or is it going to veer off in the wrong direction? Choosing the wrong abstraction or the wrong tool are the kinds of decisions which can be considered “the wrong highway”.

Stay on the Highway ‒ Do we have systems in place that give us early feedback so we know if we are heading in the wrong direction? Test automation, continuous delivery, feature toggles, monitoring and metrics are all tools that give us feedback on the quality of our work. If our existing tools are inadequate for giving us the feedback we need then investing in them first is another kind of lateral move which can help us get to the destination sooner.

Summary

If you feel like you are endlessly wading through a cornfield then think about ways to get to a highway. A lateral approach will unlock easier and faster pathways to the objective.