The Opposite of Complexity

After another late night I woke up this morning feeling distinctly low and a little sore in the head - which is unusual for me. I decided to take a walk (not a run note!) on the moor before work and as usual found myself at a familiar spot. I took my own advice and paused for a few minutes to take stock. It helped me with my current complexity overload.

I'm a victim of my own interpretation of the 80/20 rule ... again. I don't know why I'm forever being surprised by this fact of life as a software developer, that whatever the job, you get 80% of the task completed in 20% of the time, the final 20% taking up 80% of the time. I honestly thought I was almost done with this latest application, but the final tweaking and housekeeping jobs are consuming day after successive day, and evening after successive evening. My blip social life is being seriously curtailed - and this is serious, as it is my only social life at the moment! (Note to self: I really have to do something about that!)

Writing this on the train on the way home, I've got to thinking that with any reasonably complex piece of software nowadays there is never actually a point where the application is truly completed. The closer you get to that illusory notion of completion the more difficult are the very final issues to solve - those really obscure bugs that occur once in a blue moon, the ones which are the result of some strange idiosyncratic behaviour of one particular user in a one specific unusual situation. Before those more exotic problems can be tackled new features are added which inevitably introduce more important bugs to solve. The complexity of modern software is such that it is simply too expensive to eliminate every final minor bug and usability issue. As a perfectionist I find that a little discomforting, but much less so now than in the past. At this stage of life I feel like I've got better things to do with my time!

But for now I need to crack on and hopefully sort out the final few issues which will allow us to let the users free to play with the software tomorrow. They will find bugs we haven't found ourselves. They always do! It's the name of the game. It used to be fun.