The other side of NNPP

Happy New Year,

You can think of me as a polar bear coming out of the hiberantion period. I was away for months because of some personal and professional changes in my life. A lot has happened in the past 6 months. Few frauds, more stores close down, more job losss, more confirmations fo recession leading to possble chances of depression. Everybody has read about it in great details so lets discuss something different.

I just heard a new buzzword i.e. NNPP. You wish to know more about it, please read this simple and precise article on the Net Negative Producing Programmer. Ideally, I agree on all the points but I tend to think from a different perspective also.

1. Many large scale companies with masses of employees need to have all kind of people. If you know what normalization curve is and how it is applied in the industries, you know where I am coming from. Usually, they have large base of can-do workers with top of can-think workers. Can-do workers are usually low-cost employees, mostly freshers, less than 2-3 year experience guys and may be with no engineering background or hired from T-3 institutes. Nothing against them as It is also not fair to seek the best of software engineering practices from these guys. With time or training, they may learn but till then they can do mistakes leading to higher defects and all that metrics stuff. For companies, the gross margin is high on these resources. So, in any typical project, you will see many of these kind. And for Time and Material kind of projects, it means more revenue if managed effectively. So, net-net, many service (not product) companies would like to have NNPPs.

2. Lets think from people perspective also. Although some good reasons are already mentioned about people not logging the defects. I have some more...more from day to day practice.

a. Managers dont say that they wont do it. But some may try to escape a few defects to meet or exceed some of their SLAs, to show their better control of the processes.

b. Developers invent reasons not to do it ;-). Reasons are vastly different covering different aspects of attitude..

+ Tool is not nice and I am not going to keep filling the excel files.

+ Even if I log, who is going to look at it.

+ Why should I log, my manager comes back and ask me the delete it or reduce the fix hours.

+ I already know that this is a bug. So, why not just fix it?

I spent 20 minutes writing this so I didnt code. Was I being NNPP?

¬ Navjot Singh