Jenga Tower Software Development

Sometimes software is built “naturally”. By that I mean it is assembled with duct tape and chewing gum. For testing and prototyping this can be fine, but if you are building a production system, this is not the way.

When you glue together an application, this leads to tried and true problems:

1. Wack-a-mole debugging: Finally fixed the bug thats been haunting you? Great. Unfortunately that caused two new bugs.
2. Spooky action at a distance: You make a change on Screen A and something breaks on Screen B.
3. Speed bumps: Speed is great on day one, but it ain’t day one any more. As you add more and more features, things naturally slow down, but in a Jenga project things slow down much sooner and much more quickly.

There are great, well known solutions to these problems. Check out TDD to prevent reoccurring bugs, and architecture and design patterns to avoid spooky actions and maintain development performance.