This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Michael Cote. Original Post: Make the Implicit Explicit Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc. Feed URL: https://cote.io/feed/ Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Michael Cote Latest Posts From Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.

I broke one of my own suggestions for doing software better last week: always make the implicit explicit. As with most large companies, we're spending time integrating our product with other products. To further that along, we branched mainline to do the first cut of integrating with a new framework, an internal SDK.

Of course, with most large integration efforts, it's expected that things will be broken for awhile and that we'll need to fix all the broken integration points before working on the new features. So, at the beginning of this week, we happily merged the branch back into mainline. And, of course, many things are broken: they need to be converted to the new framework.

However, everyone in the team wasn't expecting this broken-ness to the degree that we (the branch people) thought acceptable. Thus, after having merged everything in, there was a collective "uh...everything is broken" type of response.

We'd just assumed everyone would know, and be ready, for that. It was implicit in the whole process (to us, at least). What we should have done is make it extremely explicit before we merged back in.

Anyhow, lesson learned...yet again ;>