Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #20 Opposite effect to one’s intention (南辕北辙）

Direction is more important than Speed.

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

Story

Once a man wanted to go to the south, but his carriage was heading north. A passer-by asked him: “If you are going to the south, why is your chariot heading north? ”

The man answered, “My horse is good at running, my driver is highly skilled at driving a carriage, and I have enough money. ”

The man didn’t consider that the direction might be wrong; the better his conditions were, the further he was away from his destination.

Meaning

Direction is more important than speed. Moving slowly in the right direction is better than fast in the wrong one.

Examples in Software Development

There are plenty of examples of the ‘Opposite effect to one’s intention (南辕北辙)’ in software development.

1. Management

A classic example is

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” — “The Mythical Man-Month” (1975)

Credit: https://workchronicles.com/comics/

Despite most project managers being well aware of the above, I have met many IT managers who did exactly that (the wrong thing).

2. Test Automation Framework

Since 2018, Cypress has gradually become popular in Web Test Automation. I was puzzled, it was a totally wrong thing, at least in every test automation attempt I witnessed since 2017 (to today). The free, standard-based Selenium WebDriver is much better in every way. By the way, every Cypress tester I met was a fake.