The Software Story of the Axe Sharpening

There is a joke for a woodchopper who axes woods with a blunt tool. When the woodchopper was asked why you didn’t whet your axe, he answered that he had a lot of work and had to cut a lof ot woods and no time to whet the tool. The last two months I observed the same situation in software version . The blunt tool was a DB which was  more than 5 000 kilometers away of the office and the acess was very slow to it. Every access to the DB for debugging purposes took us about 5 minutes and every one of us lost about 2 hours every day in waiting. We explained to our bosses that we had a problem. The problem was decided after 2 months! The aproximate calculations is that for four developers we have lost more than 300 hours in waiting of the DB which is about 20% of our development time!!!   Next time when you rushing in doing something ask yourself whether you have whet your main tool.

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