Testing Produces Patience: The Hardening of Code and Process by Fire.
While in church yesterday, I got a word. No, it wasn’t a spiritual epiphany. It was a testing epiphany! I won’t claim that it was a word from God, but I won’t say that it wasn’t either. We were in the book of James, reading this passage:
2 My brethen, count it all joy when you fall into various trials
3 Knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.
4 But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. (James 1:2-4 NKJV)
This passage struck me as very apt to the situations we’ve been in lately at work. We’ve have several software releases that haven’t quite gone to plan. We’ve had production servers flake out, and reboot when they’re not suppose to. We’ve been fighting fires on code that’s suppose to be battle tested and somewhat bullet proof.
We have had some serious lack of patience lately. People aren’t use to this kind of stress because things like this haven’t been happening with such frequency. Some of the things have never happened before. There’s some finger pointing among our group and some frustration from the business.
Instead of getting frustrated, stressed, and angry, we ought to rejoice at the opportunity we have before us and be patient to take advantage. The opportunity to learn from these mistakes and harden our process is invaluable. There’s nothing sadder than going through a horrible time in your life and not getting something out of it. It’s only through these trials that we progress toward being “perfect and complete”. The patience is necessary to reflect on the situation. Most people would want to leave the nightmare of bad production releases behind them, but you can’t–not until you find the root of the problem and come up with a way to fix it.
Don’t worry when you fail. Failure makes you slow down and be more careful about what you’re doing. Slowing down and being more careful causes your process and code to be better and more complete.
Marisa Seal
Daniel Brown
Josh Carroll