Justify five practices by their force

kind: drill

For version control, code review, CI, specifications and commit messages, name the force each addresses and what happens without it.

Solution

The instructive case is commit messages: the force is time, not scale. Without them the code still works — it just cannot be understood six months later, which is a cost you pay exactly once you have forgotten everything. A practice whose force you cannot name is a candidate for dropping.

Find the practice that is a ritual

kind: drill

Look at a process you know — from a job, a club, or a previous project — and find one step nobody can justify. What force was it supposed to address?

Solution

Usually it addressed a real force in a different context and was copied without it. That is the reason this course does not adopt git-flow or Scrum ceremonies wholesale: the practice is only as good as the force it answers here.

Explain the subject to somebody outside it

kind: drill

Write five sentences explaining to a parent why "just writing the program" is not the hard part.

Solution

The convincing version usually contains a concrete failure: two people editing the same file, a requirement that changed in February, or a system handed to somebody who was not there. Abstractions about "quality" convince nobody, including examiners.