Who's Driving?

In the world of software development, it's de rigeur to talk about what you're driven by. Back in the 80's, after I realized that, generally speaking, software should not just mutate like an irradiated fruit fly, I became database-driven then requirements-driven. In the early 90's, I lost myself and went through several stages of rebellion during which I was process-driven, goal-driven, architecture-driven, and finally feature-driven. Around the start of the millenium, people started telling me I should be domain-driven, test-driven, and model-driven.

An identity crisis is looming here. I'm not sure how I can be driven by all these things without coming down with some kind of software engineering schizophrenia. Who's driving this thing?

Seriously, it's clearer to me now than ever just how immature the software development field still is. I can't wait for the next new book that will proclaim to all the world that everything about software development should be [whatever]-driven. No other field takes such a simplistic view of itself. The truth of the matter is that none of these would-be umbrellas can alone drive software development. The agile development people may not always have cornered the market on best practices -- in some ways they, too, try to make software development too simple and linear -- but at least their approach is truly rational. Call it common-sense-driven if you feel you have to have a driver.

I wonder if in my lifetime I'll see the day when this field as a whole embraces the truth that software development is best modeled as a matrix of drivers that must be viewed and managed multidimensionally. And manipulated wisely. A thing does not have to be linear to be simple, and sophistication does not imply complexity.

The Thin Line

Beau, our Springer Spaniel, woke me up early this morning (why can't I ever seem to be able to sleep in on Saturdays?) demanding breakfast. Beau doesn't understand weekends. I guess every day is Saturday to a dog, so I won't hold it against him.

Once I'm out of bed it's hard for me to get back to sleep, so I made some coffee and walked out to get the paper. On the front page was a bizarre story. It seems a woman who lives here in one of Atlanta's suburbs came home from a vacation in Greece to find her lights on and a strange car parked in her garage. You can read the full story here, so I won't go into details, but it seems that, while this poor woman was on vacation, a woman broke into the house and moved in. I mean moved in. She put in a new washer and dryer, repainted, pulled up carpet and replaced it with tile, and put in new light fixtures.

In reading through the details, I couldn't help noticing that this squatter seemed to alternate between periods when she knew she was a thief and burglar ($23,000 worth of the owner's jewelry was found in the squatter's car), and believing that she actually owned the house. In her mind a switch was flipping, like a light bulb filament beginning to burn out.

How fine that line is between reality and a realm of blissful self-deception. This woman seems to have been crossing and recrossing the line uncontrollably, but how many times every day, and in how many small ways, do we choose to close our eyes to reality and create our own surreal internal constructs that enable us to cope with the demands life brings to our doorstep?

I think I do that more frequently than I might want to admit to myself. One of the primary themes of the New Testament is the idea of beng transformed toward Christlikeness. The apostle Paul referred to this as being conformed to the image of Christ. I'm beginning to realize, far later in my life than I would have preferred, that part of that process is the process of bringing the life of the mind and the external life into consistency with each other. All those little internal rationalizations, those little insanities that I've constructed through the years as self-justifications and coping mechanisms, are not consistent even with my external life, much less with a life that is Christ-like. Brian Doerksen wrote a song not long ago called "Change Me on the Inside" that expresses this well:

I long for freedom to live in the truth
I want to be more like You
But every time I try to bring about change
I only touch the visible me
There’s only one way I’m really gonna change

Change me on the inside...

This seems simple and easy to dismiss with a "well, of course." But it means yielding to Christ in the deepest internal places -- it means giving Him control of the switch that we flip to turn off the sense of reality that the Spirit uses to lead us to respond to the world with compassion and to turn on nicer realities that enable us to focus on self instead. It's humbling to realize at 45 that the appearance of some increasing level of Christlike behavior is nothing even remotely close to what Christ really longs to see in me.

Become a Gambler Who Never Loses!

Just get into the auto insurance business. Today we received a notice from our car insurance company (who shall remain nameless but who is associated with a small green lizard -- which seems very fitting now that I think about it) that our insurance will be canceled unless we remove our daughter from our policy.

Now our daughter is 20 years old, a college student with a high GPA, and happens to have had the misfortune to have had two minor accidents over the past two years. Otherwise our driving records are clean. The Lizard says that "after careful consideration" (which -- believe me because I am a software architect -- means that some type of data mining software flagged our account and generated a form letter signed by an "underwriter"), it was determined that we did not meet its stringent requirements.

In other words and in more direct terminology, "You can pay us usurious rates as long as there is no indication that it will ever cost us anything, but if there exists any evidence that we might ever be required to actually stand behind the policy for which you are paying, well, then you represent a poor risk."

A quick phone call with a perfectly friendly, cordial, sympathetic, but worthless customer service representative provided me with addtional detail. The Lizard would be happy to offer my wife and I as well as my daughter coverage if I remove our daughter from our policy. Then my wife and I would receive a "preferred" rate, and my daughter would be able to independently purchase coverage at the amazing low rate of just $1600 every six months.

Of course, I'll now start shopping for other coverage, but it's difficult to feel so trapped by a situation in which the government requires coverage, but does nothing to regulate the behavior of an industry whose powerful lobby demands that it never be held accountable for such unethical behavior. Like a whining, spoiled child, it insists on gambling with no risk of losing. And its parents always give it what it wants.

Wouldn't it be great if we, like today's insurance corporations, could walk into a casino, place bets using other people's money, then walk away with that money whether we win or lose? It staggers the mind.