Yesterday I was watching discovery channel (ya, sometimes I do that also), while checking on one of my favorite series “Big” , found that the episode was actually talking about one of the Indian cities “Mumbai”. The name itself brings so many pictures. For the people in other part of the world, this city is business capital of India. The reason for the episode and for this blog is “this relatively small city is one of the most populated cities in the World (in-fact second most populous city in the world)”.
The episode talked about two of the major infrastructure projects currently in progress: Bandra–Worli Sea Link (Part of Western Freeway) and Eastern Freeway. Not going in too many details as you can check the Wikipedia links I have given above, one of the projects is a road link over the sea and another one is mostly elevated road link. Reason for this, as correctly mentioned in the episode, there is no space left in Mumbai so only option is to either build the road in the sea or in the air.
Though I am not against the new infrastructure projects but in the City like Mumbai and country like India where these costly projects are no easy tasks, isn’t this a Gold carpet to cover the previous mistakes. Mumbai is already packed to the brim; instead of making things seemingly better for more people to pour in, shouldn’t we rather think of better planning. One option is to make sure that apart from the important businesses which should stay in Mumbai (Mumbai is one of the busiest port in the world) other companies should be asked to move out slowly or at-least a complete stop of any new businesses until the infrastructure is capable of supporting the existing bulk.
Coming back to the title of the blog, I have seen a similar situation in many software projects. The amount of code that pours in rises exponentially in years and no one even looking into what’s already existing and if the current architecture can support the new functionality.
To mentioned some of the rather funny and worry some cases , in one project we completed the i18n of 100s of files; later to find that it was all dead code no longer used in the product. (all getting build, packaged and published to all customers). In another instance, we did lengthy investigation to implement a long awaited feature, created the design and at the time of implementation found that it was already available in the code. No one cared to document or use it.
Why so much effort wastage on solving the wrong problems. How much time it takes to create at-least the architecture document of a software product? How much time does it take to understand the current architecture, clean up things before putting in more stuff. Since many years I continue to get amazed. And just for information, its 8 months since we informed the client about that dead code, it’s still there (build, packaged and ….)
The episode talked about two of the major infrastructure projects currently in progress: Bandra–Worli Sea Link (Part of Western Freeway) and Eastern Freeway. Not going in too many details as you can check the Wikipedia links I have given above, one of the projects is a road link over the sea and another one is mostly elevated road link. Reason for this, as correctly mentioned in the episode, there is no space left in Mumbai so only option is to either build the road in the sea or in the air.
Though I am not against the new infrastructure projects but in the City like Mumbai and country like India where these costly projects are no easy tasks, isn’t this a Gold carpet to cover the previous mistakes. Mumbai is already packed to the brim; instead of making things seemingly better for more people to pour in, shouldn’t we rather think of better planning. One option is to make sure that apart from the important businesses which should stay in Mumbai (Mumbai is one of the busiest port in the world) other companies should be asked to move out slowly or at-least a complete stop of any new businesses until the infrastructure is capable of supporting the existing bulk.
Coming back to the title of the blog, I have seen a similar situation in many software projects. The amount of code that pours in rises exponentially in years and no one even looking into what’s already existing and if the current architecture can support the new functionality.
To mentioned some of the rather funny and worry some cases , in one project we completed the i18n of 100s of files; later to find that it was all dead code no longer used in the product. (all getting build, packaged and published to all customers). In another instance, we did lengthy investigation to implement a long awaited feature, created the design and at the time of implementation found that it was already available in the code. No one cared to document or use it.
Why so much effort wastage on solving the wrong problems. How much time it takes to create at-least the architecture document of a software product? How much time does it take to understand the current architecture, clean up things before putting in more stuff. Since many years I continue to get amazed. And just for information, its 8 months since we informed the client about that dead code, it’s still there (build, packaged and ….)
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