Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #11 Pulling Up the Seedlings to Help Them Grow（拔苗助长）

To spoil things through a desire for quick results.

Image Credit: https://www.gushi365.com/info/11.html

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

Story

written by Mencius, a famous philosopher, ~300BC.

There was a farmer in the State of Song who was very impatient. Day and night he longed for the seedlings in the field to grow tall and strong quickly. But the seedlings grew very slowly, not as quickly as he hoped.

One day, he hit upon a good idea. He sneaked to the field and pulled each seedling up a little bit from the soil. Seeing that all these seedlings in the field were taller than before, he felt very pleased with himself.

He went home. Though all worn out, he couldn’t wait to tell his family: “I worked very hard for a whole day today. And the seedlings in the field have grown a lot taller.”

When his son heard that the seedlings had grown taller, he hurried to the field to take a look. Instead of seeing the seedlings growing taller, he saw all the seedlings had started to wither.

Meaning

Pulling up the seedlings to help them grow is a metaphor for those who go against the natural, objective course of things and are hasty to get success, but only to fail at last.

The equivalent in English: “You cannot have ten pregnant mothers to have a baby in one month”.

This idiom was told by the famous philosopher Mencius. At the end of the story, Mencius added: “There are only a few not doing this.”

Examples in Software Development

As Mencius said, “Pulling Up the Seedlings to Help Them Grow” happens a lot in general, certainly common in software development.

Hiring more programmers when under pressure, hoping to speed up development.

When the deadline approaches, the management gets panicked and often chooses to hire more programmers in order to complete the task on time. As pointed out in the classic software engineering book: “The Mythical Man-Month” (1975), the result will undoubtedly slow the whole team down. I am certain many software engineers have experienced this.

This makes me think, why do so many IT managers (generations by generations) repeatedly make so plainly stupid mistakes? Can you really trust IT managers’ claims of doing Agile or DevOps?

Of course, proactively improving based on solid engineering practices is different from silly acts. There are proven and effective ways to improve a software team’s productivity, such as automated regression testing.

Put a false hope on expensive test automation tools

Test Automation has been widely attempted in software projects but mostly failed. One typical mistake is that IT managers want automated tests to be created quickly (to try to reach perfect coverage). This mindset often leads them to fall into test automation tool vendor’s sale pitches, such as: