15.4. Un-Choosing the Wrong Tools

As important (or perhaps even more so) than choosing the right tools is rejecting bad tools. In fact, an anti-pattern exists that describes this: boat anchor. A boat anchor is a tool that you are forced to use even though it is ridiculously ill-suited for the job at hand. Frequently, this boat anchor costs a vast amount of money, increasing the political pressure to use it for every situation. For a tortured but depressingly accurate metaphor, imagine that a carpenter was forced to use a sledge hammer (undoubtably powerful) for driving nails. The unsuitability in this case is obvious, but we make similar and even worse decisions in software.

I was recently involved in the inception of a project at a large enterprise. We were introducing many Agile tenets to the developers, who viewed them as fresh air. One of the decisions involved version control. The Infrastructure Control representative came to talk to us and provided two choices: Rational ClearCase or Serena Version Manager. In case you aren’t familiar with these two version control packages, both are quite expensive and have vast functionality (with a corresponding footprint). Our choice? None of the above. We suggested Subversion, the lightweight open source version control package. We described it to the Infrastructure Control people, and they agreed that it sounded perfect for their needs. Then the big question “How much is the licensing fee per user?” They were stunned when we told them that it was free. Then, reflectively, they said, “You know, we installed ClearCase for another group of developers about six months ago, and they don’t seem to like it very much.”