NIH

Before I knew what National Institutes of Health was, before I moved to the US, NIH stood for "Not Invented Here."

The reappearance of this phenomenon on my radar is coincident with my deepening involvement in the Agile/XP world. Coincidence? I sure hope so. So step forward all you XPers and agilistas and tell me that you are at least as allergic to NIH as I am.

In the last month I have spent hours (with a pair) figuring out why http session management is broken. I have spent days (with various pairs) trying to outwit a half-baked Hibernate session management infrastructure. Today I spent several hours (with a pair) getting some file manipulation utilities to work.

Even back in the days of Struts 0.5, session management was pretty damned solid. And the Spring-like management of Hibernate sessions by tying them to a request/response cycle (in the simplest case) was hashed out years ago. And the Apache commons I/O library is pretty mature at this point. Hell, it's already on our classpath!

So how did this mess come to be? The answers I got in the past were vague hand-waves along the lines of "well we needed something simple and lightweight so we built our own."

Yeah, yeah, "the simplest thing that could possibly work." But surely the definition of "work" also includes "does not require constant repair and debugging"?

Maybe it's just innocence. Maybe those people really believe that an app framework is "too big" and so building out a Struts-lookalike from scratch is excusable. Maybe they really believe that they just know they will never need to manage Hibernate sessions with a broader scope than a single call. Maybe they really believe the file manipulation is just a quickie, undeserving of a library.

To me the simplest thing that could possibly work is to use code that someone else has spent years refining and is known to work.

Please tell me all this NIH is not hubris.

Labels: xp

Post a Comment

Comments: