Jeffrey Harris

Becoming numb to pain

There is a post from Joel Clermont about not becoming numb to pain in your project, and I want to expand on it.

When joining a new project, you have the opportunity to do a tissue test of the setup documentation. I heard the term tissue test years ago, and can't find a definitive source anymore. Too many results for biological tests are in the way.

A tissue test refers to a test that you can only do once. Once you've done it, you have probably done some troubleshooting or installations that make future tests different from the first. It's like using a tissue; you can only use it once. Every time you attempt to fix a problem, you're changing the situation. If a dependency has been abandoned, or a major release changes an option, you've now changed the starting point, and your tissue test is invalid.

I ran into that same problem recently when trying to give .NET a whirl. I was installing tools from scratch, and found an issue in the setup documentation. Unfortunately, because the people who could fix the bug already had working systems, they couldn't duplicate my starting point to verify the issue. I guess that's why there's Stack Overflow.

All through high school band, and continuing through my community chorus and barbershop quartet, we become numb to pain. There are certain spots in the numbers where there isn't adequate tuning, or a discrepancy in phrasing. It's always thought of as "you can't fix everything at the same time," so we fix the most glaring issues. As time goes on, the less obtrusive errors continue, becoming habit in the performers, and in everyone else's ears.

We become numb to the fact that the first phrase of the song has suboptimal tuning because the reprise needs more work. It's not just development that becomes numb to pain, it's everything. Even football teams become numb to the pain of their offensive line, saying "we'll work on that in the off-season." And that's why the Raiders were on the draft clock since the 18th week of last year's season.