| Speaking of outcomes, what would be the outcome of "your code is too complex"? Until you define that you got nothing. There is a concept that is sometimes true, sometimes not, of the conservation of complexity. Its not just typical physics envy, sometimes it really does exist. So pushing complexity out of small pieces of code will probably make "something" more complex. So in the idea outcome, what would you make more complex, and why would that be better than status quo? Once you explore that, your plan should be pretty clear one way or another. And this is where the warfare analogy of allies comes in. If you don't know that the other guy and operations are allied because the somewhat more complex error handling code makes operations much easier, and your bosses boss has some financial interest in making life easier for ops and harder for devs, then you'll be totally surprised when the operations manager or possibly his boss, is called in as an indirect fire weapon on your position. Or possible financial crush you don't know about where you'll ship sooner or none of you will be employed for the maint time anyway. Which sucks, but the only thing worse than living in it is not knowing or understanding why. So you need to sniff out alliances. And be reasonable about giving up. There may be a perfectly rational reason you don't understand (or, maybe not...) and the best way to handle a failed campaign is to abandon it and wind it down as fast and cheaply as possible. Its possible to make horrible analogies with the military and endless distraction about politics. However, it seems fairly non-controversial as a learning tool to at least gloss over a five paragraph operations order. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_order I'm not sugggesting writing it all out and using NATO phonetics or making pew-pew sound effects. But failure to plan is planning to fail so if you don't at least gloss over an outline of an op order and imagine what analogy or summary you'd provide for each line, then you're not planning, so you're planning to fail. As far as SMEAC goes, ops question is asking for advice on a part of "E" but most commenters are going to complain that "S" "M" "A" and "C" are going to dramatically alter "E", so its pointless to discuss "E" in isolation. If you're allergic to the military or think "SMEAC" sounds too much like a james bond villian corporation, there are probably non-mil planning tools of equivalent usefulness that I am not as familiar with, that some should please follow up with links to... |