By Jim Grey (about)
A woman named Verna built the house I live in. She landscaped it nicely; a sprawling flowerbed stretches in front of my front door and picture windows. Every spring, I eagerly await Verna’s spring color: yellow daffodils, purple hyacinths, red tulips, and finally the giant pink peonies.
I’ve added a few things: lilies, mums, lavender, coreopsis, phlox. I love phlox! But my eagerness to keep adding color petered out pretty quickly because it turns out I hate digging in the dirt.
I don’t much enjoy any of the other routine garden maintenance, either. Mulching. Deadheading. Dividing overgrown plants. Weeding – oh god, the weeding. Does it make me lazy that I just spray my weeds with Roundup and move on?
I just want to enjoy the flowers. But this ninth spring I’ve lived in my home, a few of my plants didn’t come back as strong. A couple didn’t come back at all.
So I asked my mom. She’s the gardener in our family. “When was the last time you fertilized?” she said. “Um, never,” I said. “Ah,” she said.
It turns out that you can’t just ignore the soil, or the plants themselves for that matter. Things growing in it year after year uses up all the nutrients, and crowded plants compete with each other for what little is there. “I’m surprised your flowers didn’t stop coming back a few years ago,” Mom said.
I did some serious fertilizing this season. I also separated some overgrown hostas and moved some of Verna’s plants so they had some elbow room. Not fun, but necessary.
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I once worked for a software company whose flagship product sold briskly. Version 1.0 was five years in the past, and since then we’d added lots of new features so the product could continue to lead the market. And now here came the head of Product Management asking for more new features
Dan, a quiet fellow, graying at the temples, led Development. “Well, yes, we can add all those features,” Dan said, adjusting his glasses. “This one will take six months. That one will take four. This other one, well, I think that’ll take a year.”
The Product Manager was dumbfounded. “Features of similar scope took far less time in the past, and you had fewer developers then. What gives?”
Dan looked up at the Product Manager kindly, and drew a breath. “Well, we’ve been under such pressure to quickly add features to this product that we’ve not focused enough on its overall design. We’ve also made no time to keep our underlying architecture up to date. These are things I’ve been pointing out all along the way. But we’ve just bolted features on wherever we thought we could get away with it. Now, to add any one of the features you’ve requested, we basically have to unbolt three or four other features, and blend the code all together. And we have to write complicated bridge code to do modern things with our aging architecture, and when that doesn’t work we will have to upgrade some parts of it and test the product well to make sure everything still works. It’s a slow process. And it’s just going to get slower and slower the longer we keep going like this.”
That the product’s design had become cancerous and the underlying architecture had gone out of date were not considered a crisis –- but not being able to rapidly add new features sure was. It focused the company’s entire attention. Their response was to code up a “next generation” product from scratch, which was a disastrous idea for a whole bunch of reasons beyond the point of this story. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001-2002, they had not yet successfully launched the next-generation product, and they still couldn’t add features to the old product fast enough. Revenue fell precipitously. Quarterly layoffs began, but it was not enough to keep the wolves from the door. That once-promising company was sold; the company that bought it outsourced development to China.
More recently I went to work for another promising software company. They had been in business for about a decade and had sold their software to a number of very large companies. But in the couple years before I’d been hired, the pace of new feature delivery had slowed to a crawl. Adding new features had become increasingly difficult and always broke existing features. As a result, it took longer and longer to test the product, but even then, major bugs were still being delivered to customers. Meanwhile, younger, more nimble competitors were stealing business away from us. As the rate of new revenue decreased, support costs skyrocketed. It was unsustainable, and that company, too, had to sell itself to another company to avoid collapse.
It was much the same story: the company had focused entirely on rapid new-feature delivery and not enough on ongoing design and architecture. After a decade, their soil had gone infertile and the code had become tangled. Nothing new would grow.
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Software as a garden: to be able to grow more software, to be able to grow revenue with it, you have to keep the soil fertile and give the roots room. The problem is, gardening projects are a hard sell. These are things like refactoring older parts of the code that no longer serve efficiently, or upgrading or replacing outdated parts of the architecture, or redesigning subsystems that work fine today but can’t adapt to things the company wants to do in the future. When you tell executives you need to do these things, what they hear is that they can’t have new features while you do it. New features fuel growing companies.
But if you don’t tend your garden, sooner or later it will stop producing.
Jim Grey 