Friday, August 12, 2011

Impatient Patient and a Helpless Doctor Syndrome

Working to help in performance and stability in agile development
environments/developer eco systems poses some interesting challenges for
performance engineering folks.

I get reminded of what i call a "Impatient Patient and Helpless Doctor"
syndrome in such eco/environments.

The development staff mostly very senior and already given you an
impression of they know/understand their code/systems they develop well
enough that they want to be helped only in understanding what they need
or think need to be done.

This is like a Impatient Patient but very learned/educated at same time
requesting the doctor to get him/her checked and get rid of all "XYZ"
scalability and performance issues. What follows is the doctor initially
goes into a Helpless mode as the Patient itself suggests all
methods/tests be performed on him/her and often indicative of the
cure/medicine for the assumed illness.

Not to say that only a Successful doctor helps the patient to come out
of such mental concoctions and manages to truly help the patient in the
end winning their confidence. But this doesnt come that easily and
chances that the doctor though clever enough can become crippled and
helpless to the extent of losing interest in the subject can very well
happen.

Lesson learnt is : The patient should allow the doctor to do his/her job
without imposing too many blockades and doctor also give some mental
peace to the mentally agitated patient along with cures. Needless to say that the patient need to be cured really but providing mental peace to patient helps.


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