Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #31 Carrying Firewood to Put Out a Fire 抱薪救火
Save a situation and end up by making it worse.
This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.
The Story
During the Warring States period (475–221BC), the powerful State of Qin attacked and defected the State of Wei repeatedly. At every defeat, the State of Wei either lost land or ceded land to the State of Qin to exchange for a temporary truce.
In 273 BC, the Qin army launched another vigorous attack upon the State of Wei and approached the capital city. The king of the State of Wei summoned his officials. Most of the officials still suggested King give away the large area of land to the State of Qin to seek peace.
However, Su Dai, a counsellor, did not agree. He said: “The invaders are insatiable, but our land is limited. You will never get peace by ceding the land because Qin will never stop assaulting us until our land is totally given away.”
Su Dai continued: “This is like holding firewood to put out the fire. You throw the firewood into the fire one by one, but how can the fire be put out? As long as there is still the firewood, the fire will not be extinguished.”
The King ignored Su Dai’s convincing argument and gave away a large area of the land to the State of Qin again. As expected, the Qin army assaulted the State of Wei in 225 B.C again and eliminated The State of Wei.
The Meaning
This idiom is a metaphor for those who originally tried to solve the problem, but adopted the wrong method and ended up making the situation worse.
There is a similar Chinese idiom: “drink poison to quench thirst”.
Examples in Software Development
This happens in fake agile software projects commonly. When the development is on halt or showing bad signs, the agile coach and the project manager will spend more time on “Sprint Planning”, “Retrospective”, “Estimating Story Points”, “Breaking Use Stories in Tasks”, etc, in the hope of these processes helpful. However, they are not mostly. Instead, they often make things worse.
The reason for the failure is that these people did not understand the fundamentals of software development which are:
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