Driving Technical Change

Pitfalls

There are two major pitfalls when using this technique:

• While you’re learning, you force others to use it.

• In selling, you patronize or bully others.

Forcing Others

When most people begin with a technology, they go for easy demos or test code. Most tools work perfectly fine in these cases because they’re not too complicated. We know this, so we start to want to work on a real use case with the tool or technique. At this point, you’ll be tempted to use it in your working code. But before you do so, consider whether by doing so you force others to have to switch to it. Depending on the technique, you may be forcing it on people when you aren’t prepared to show it to them.

In the story, Ed just took an existing procedure and ported it ...