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Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #33 The More, The Better 多多益善
Higher capability is required to manage more.
This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.
The Story
Han Xin is one of the most famous generals in Chinese history. One day, the emperor asked Han Xin casually, “How many soldiers do you think that I could command”.
Han Xin replied: “Your Majesty, you could command up to 100,000”.
The emperor asked, “What about you then?”
“The More, The Better”, Han Xin answered.
The emperor was not happy with this response, and said “If so, why are you under my control?”
Han Xin said: “Your Majesty is good at commanding generals”.
The Meaning
While the literal meaning of this idiom is quite obvious, I did not quite understand the story until many years later after I had some managing experience. I believe what was not said in this story is the capability required to command more soldiers.
Just imagine when you guide 500 people for a tour, there will be some issues unavoidably, let alone on a battlefield. Han Xin could command unlimited numbers of soldiers (many believed that due to his impressive winning records) because of his ability to train a squad of soldiers to act like a single soldier.
Examples in Software Development
In test automation, the number of automated tests matters a lot. We commonly see demonstrations of test automation using a so-called “new automation framework” which will be forgotten shortly later, i.e. not really used. I have to say that not all engineers are incompetent or pretending. Some of them tried but lacked the capability to handle dozens of automated End-to-End tests.
Creating a few automated tests is easy, and any fool could have done that two decades ago by using a recorder. The challenge is to maintain ALL the tests while the application keeps changing. Check out this article: Is Your Test Automation on Track? Maintenance is the key.
“Outdated and incorrect…
