You're stupid!

 עברית

you are stupid, and the sooner you'll accept it, the better.
But don't worry, your colleague is stupid as well, and so am I. And while it's true that some people seem to be stupider than most others, I want to focus on the regular level of stupidity.

Recently, I've been mentoring some teammates that suffer from the same problem - it takes them forever to complete tasks, especially those that involves coding. They can do it, but getting started takes forever, and code review frequently requires a large portion of rework. When we dove into it, we found that the reason was similar as well - they were over analyzing (and therefore not sure how to start), and were getting lost several times during coding. Its just that there are so many details to take care of. 

To deal with it, we're starting working on what is probably the most fundamental programming skill - top-down design (which should not be conflated with TDD, even though one might argue that test-driven design is a specific form of top-down design). I asked them to practice consciously and force themselves to implement their code in a pure top-down approach, and commit every time a level was "done". So they did, and when we got to review it, I saw the problem - they were making shortcuts, adding something they "knew would be needed" and making a mental mess in their head. 

The power of top-down approach is that you first decide on a way something will be used, and only afterwards understand what needs to be done in order to actually make it happen. It's not a panacea, but for this kind of problems, its just what the doctor ordered. There are a lot of tiny details that needs to be taken care of, and working within an already existing framework complicates manners even more as you need to adopt the mindset suitable to it as well. 

When we stop to think about it, this approach benefits are not limited to coding. It can help with all sort of analysis and planning problems as well. Just like with recursion - there's some sort of magic in that we solve our problems by pretending they are smaller. It almost doesn't matter how complicated is the task we are trying to perform, it can probably be broken down to no more than five high level steps, and those steps can be broken down as well, until we get to a problem that is already solved.

as I was writing it, I started wondering whether this sort of thinking is required as a precondition to TDD, as the mindset seems pretty much similar. Perhaps it's the other way and  TDD can be a way of adopting top-down thinking, but whatever the case, I believe it's an important tool to have in your toolbox. After all, we are too stupid to keep the entire problem we're working on in our head.