TITLE: Don't Forget to Solve Your Problem a Second Time
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 11, 2010 11:55 AM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
The Toyota Production System encourages workers to solve every
problem two ways.  First, you fix the issue at hand.  Second,
you work back through the system to determine the systemic
reason that the issue arose.  In this way, you eliminate this
as a problem in the future, or at least make it less likely.

As I
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-11.html#e2010-11-29T14_34_39.htm">
   wrote recently</A>,
I don't think of writing software as a production process.
But I do think that software developers can benefit from
the "solve it twice" mentality.  When we encounter a bug
in our program or a design problem in our system or a
delivery problem on a project, we should address the
specific issue at hand.  Then we should consider how we
might prevent this sort of problem from recurring.  There
are several ways that we might improve:
<UL>
<LI> We may need better or different tools.  </LI>
<LI> We may be able to streamline or augment our process.  </LI>
<LI> We may need to think about different things while working.  </LI>
<LI> We may need to know something more deeply, or something new.  </LI>
</UL>

This approach would benefit us as university students and
university professors, too.  If students and professors
thought more often in terms of continuous improvement and
committed to fixing problems the second time, too, we
might all have lower
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-10T15_43_50.htm">
   mean times to competence</A>.
-----