Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #14 Waiting for Hares by the Tree(守株待兔)

Betting on some random stroke of luck

Image credit: https://www.sohu.com/a/518133887_121198689

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

Story

written by Han Fei, a famous philosopher, ~300BC.

One day, a farmer was working in the fields when he saw a hare running past him, dashing itself into a tree stump. The hare broke its neck and died.

Without any effort, the farmer happily enjoyed a meal of rabbit meat. He was very pleased and thought how nice it would be if every day were like this.

Thereupon, he no longer cultivated his land, but watched by that tree and waited for the chance to pick up another hare that knocked itself dead against the tree stump.

Several days passed, and no hare appeared. Meanwhile, the field had quickly become overgrown, and the farmer became a laughingstock all across the state.

Meaning

This idiom mocks people who merely wait for some random stroke of luck instead of making an earnest effort to pursue opportunities or what they need.

this is the first Chinese idiom my daughter liked, when she was 5 years old.

Examples in Software Development

On CI/CD

As a Test Automation consultant, I have seen many so-called CI/CD implementations in many software projects. So far, every CI/CD failed or was faking it. A typical approach (at least 2012–2019) was to attempt to run Selenium tests in Jenkins. However, the best pass rate (excluding the first week, only a handful of tests) was 48% among all I witnessed. By the way, the target is 100% or near it. I have always been able to achieve that with raw Selenium WebDriver (RSpec) running in BuildWise, my own international award-winning CT server.

To me, those so-called test automation and DevOps engineers were just pushing their luck. Yes, It is crazy but everywhere (think about this idiom). The very simple reason is that they did not know test automation or CI/CD. Both (real) skills are rare.

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