Another Set of Eyes

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. --Einstein
How many times, as a developer, have you found yourself mindlessly and stubbornly trying to solve a problem (some thrown exception, for example) for an hour, two hours, or even longer, without a solution?
This is like the Einstein quote above: madness! What you need to do is get Another Set of Eyes to sit by you while you work your way through the issue. It doesn't even have to be a developer who is very familiar with the codebase you're working on -- the mere act of "changing the paradigm" will enable you to look at the problem more objectively and find the answer quickly.
In a team environment, we have a general rule that if you're stuck on a problem for more than 20 or 30 minutes, you put your ego in your back pocket and ask another developer to come sit by you while you demonstrate the issue.
Recently another developer I work with asked me over. He admitted having so far spent some 5 hours on an exception that he could not figure out. After sitting with him for ten minutes, he himself found the answer. It works.
Suprise! Ask for help, and willingly give help. The problem gets solved. Try it!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Jeffry Morris4:14 PM

    I am a huge believer in situations such as this one; it's the 'paired programming' approach from XP and it works amazingly well.

    It does require one to open themselves up to a little humility, which can be difficult for some.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BlackTigerX4:31 PM

    I've done and recommended the same thing many times, it does work

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sameer Bhattia3:57 PM

    Tell it to the duck
    (no really, thats what they say, explain it to a rubber duck, and that really helps)

    ReplyDelete

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