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Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #9 Covering One’s Ears to Steal a Bell (掩耳盗铃)
A man deceives himself by burying his head in the sand.
This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.
Story
Once upon a time, a man saw a doorbell hanging from someone’s door and wanted to steal it. But he knew that if he were to steal the bell, it would start ringing the moment his hand touched it. If he were discovered, he wouldn’t get the bell and he himself might also get caught.
He thought this over and said to himself: “Why would there be trouble when a bell rings? This is because our ears can hear it. If I cover my ears, I won’t be able to hear it. This way I won’t be caught.”
He first covered his own ears and then tried to steal the bell. Despite his plan, he was still discovered and caught red-handed.
Meaning
It is impossible to cover up something that is obvious. One can’t deceive himself by burying his head in the sand.
Examples in Software Development
A few years ago, I started a contracting role in a large IT division. The team was quite impressed with my automation work on the first day. The test lead M in our department noticed that too, he told me that the CIO recently said in a town-hall meeting: “Our main app team, under the chief agile coach’s leadership, runs 980 automated End-to-End tests every night.” I said: “It must be a lie”.
M showed signs of doubt, “It was the work of the Chief Agile Coach, I heard her talking about this a few times too”.
I continued: “Besides talking, did you see any real evidence? I spoke at STARWEST (the world’s most premium software testing conference), many even found it hard to believe that I could manage running 200+ selenium tests daily, which you can verify. If the company was capable of managing 980 automated E2E tests that run daily, the whole software development culture (such as daily production releases like at Facebook, No defect tracking, …, etc) will be completely different, which I don’t see here.”
