Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #03 Imitating Beauty (东施效颦)

Take a leaf out of the book, but do it wrongly.

Image Credit: https://www.jianshu.com/p/e55c4ea89983

This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.

Story: Imitating Beauty

Xi Shi (西施) was an acclaimed beauty in ancient China (~500 BC). Xi suffered from some sort of heart ailment. Therefore, she was often seen eyebrow knitting slightly walking through the village with a hand on her chest.

Dong Shi, an ugly woman living in the neighbourhood, always envied Xi’s ineffable beauty and she also noticed the beauty’s eyebrow knitting and graceful gait. Therefore, Dong decided to imitate her idol’s manner of walking. She thought that this might help disguise some of her ugliness.

But the imitation only made Dong look uglier. People shut doors or turned away to avoid seeing the unpleasant contortion of her.

note: this fable story is from the classic ‘ZhuangZhi’ book (~300BC), it is not about judging people on appearance.

Meaning

Blindly copying others’ superficial acts only makes oneself look foolish.

Examples in Software Development

Automated Unit Testing (e.g. JUnit), Test Driven Development, Refactoring, Automated End-to-End UI Testing, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Testing are all good practices though few software projects did them well in practice. However, this does not stop them from labelling their projects ‘Agile’, ‘CI/CD’, or ‘DevOps’.

These “fake” agile coaches/Scrumasters mainly focus on superficial practices (known as ‘Agile Ceremonies’) such as

• daily stand-up meetings

• retrospectives

These behaviours are just like Dong’s imitating eyebrow knitting of Xi.

“I was in South Africa, at Agile Africa, and somebody came up to me and said “Well, we want to do software development, but we just can’t stand all this ceremony and Agile stuff. We just want to write some programs.” And tears came into my eyes…like…how can it be that we who set out to refocus development on essentials and get rid of stuff that didn’t matter, how can it be that we’re right back where we were 20 years ago? Like how can it be that ‘this is too much ceremony’? … No, this is wrong. I don’t know what to do about it. ”
– Kent Beck, Father of Agile, in an inverview (2019–10–15)

Some even waste a lot of time on estimating user story points and Jira.

“bloody mistake” — Ron Jeffries, co-author of Agile Manifesto and the creator of “Story Points”

In those projects, regression testing is conducted manually. How can it be called Agile?!

The real beauty (like Xi) of Agile/DevOps is the Continuous Testing process, which enables daily production releases.