Junkyard Wars!

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I was watching Junkyard Wars on television Sunday, and it started me thinking. If you’re not familiar with the show, the premise is that a team is placed in a junkyard and given a task to complete in some fixed period of time. For instance, the team might be tasked with assembling a motor boat from scrap parts, in one day, sun up to sun down. They gather some crude pieces, bind it all together with baling wire and duct tape and then gather the following day for some terribly simple test. If the boat can pick up a passenger, circle a buoy, and return to dock, all without disintegrating, sinking or falling apart, the exercise is considered a grand success.

It occurred to me that this process bears a striking resemblance to software development. You get some assignment. You gather the raw materials trying to decide what components you need and how quickly they can be fit together. You work at a break-neck pace to assemble something that sort of works within the given time constraints. You forgo robustness, reliability, safety, maintainability or cost, all in the interest of being able to perhaps satisfy the limits of the stated assignment. You test it, and as long as the software accomplishes something vaguely resembling the original goals, and doesn’t blow up, killing the user in the process, the project is considered a grand success. Next week, you get to build a dirigible! Woohoo!

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