Jim Highsmith writes “Do it right the First Time sends the wrong message: it says we can’t be uncertain, experiment, learn from mistakes, or deviate from the plan”
A friend of mine commented that while interesting, this was taking the “Do it right the First Time” out of context. I thought I’d look into it a bit more, and from what I can tell, “Do it right the First Time” is an idea embodied in the First Time Through (FTT) manufacturing metric, which itself is based on the Zero Defects idea of which is part of “Philip Crosby’s 14 Step Quality Improvement Process” (someone please correct me if I am wrong).
While I would agree that it seems reasonable to apply this ideal in a manufacturing setting (a highly consistent and repeatable process), I don’t see it as being a good principle to apply elsewhere (say, software development).
The problem I see, is that the principle is often applied in areas that are inappropriate. Design documents for software would be a great example. If a software enhancement was designed was discovered later to be unbuildable, is it the developers fault for not being smart enough? Or is it the designers fault for not understanding the very technical system constraints? Or maybe it was further downstream, and the customer didn’t know what they wanted till they had something to look at. The process depends on experimentation, and is always uncertain at the start. 9 times out of 10, you end up building something entirely different than what you thought you were going to build at the beginning. The way I see it, highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary processes can’t possibly be done right the first time, because progress is an act of discovery, not an act of manufacturing.
So was it taken out of context? Yea, a little.
But is it a good reminder because the principle is frequently applied out of context? Absolutely.
Tags: agile, lean, software development
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