A hard thing is never done by reading an article about doing it.

From Michael Kopp of rands in repose fame on Twitter.

I have relearned this the hard way over the past few months. Documentation and sales pitches are the same as an article.

Don’t get me wrong, articles, documentation, or sales pitches are great for coming up with the hypothetical. Only by testing that hypothesis enough to resolve all the various possible problems can one have confidence in it.

Probably I still have this point of view because I sit at bottom rung of the organizational ladder where we implement the hypothetical. The higher one goes up the ladder, the less one works in reality and more immersed in hypothetical. Taking the time to send this down to someone like me to work out the problems and then make a decision based on that strong reality-based grounding takes strong discipline.

There will be pressure to make a decision faster. One way to make that improvement is to skip the testing or do less testing. We end up paying for that later by making a poor decision which costs us later. Maybe I get annoyed because I am one of the people who has to pay the cost of making the impossible happen.