Our inability to be perfect does not constitute failure.
Such a comforting sentence. And such a necessary sentence, because it’s so true.
When I read it in a Stackexchange thread, it immediately spoke to me. I want to repeat it here, because I think we all know this, but we also all forget it sometimes.
Mistakes are part of any operation
Since we can’t avoid mistakes, the real question is just how to deal with them when they happen. The answer is simple: Own them. In fact, make it a conscious practice to get better at owning your mistakes. And in turn make it easy for our coworkers to own their mistakes, instead of giving them a hard time.
There are really two things to do:
- Communicate the error to those who need to know.
- Analyse the mistake to figure out if steps need to be taken to avoid it in the future.
Communicate
Make known defects plain to users of your product, if it’s visible to them.
Make known defects plain to your fellow engineers, so that they won’t accidentally rely on your broken code, or (even worse), come to expect its broken behaviour.
Enter each defect in your bug tracker, so that there is a record of this particular mistake, an its resolution.
It may scratch your ego to admit to a mistake. But realise how much more impressed people will be with someone who is confident enough to own up to his mistake.
In fact the best developers I’ve known were all not just confident about hearing about their mistakes, but actively thankful if you went up to them and told them.
Analyse
There will always be defects in our testing / quality control processes. Always.
What does this particular problem tell you? Did somebody just make a typo? Or did you uncover a design flaw? How often does this kind of error happen? And how was it found?
If you encountered a spelling error, and you found it during proofreading: relax. You have a process in place to catch such errors, and you’ve just proven the process works.
Or did a defect slip by your quality tests unnoticed, and your customer found it? Still relax, it’s going to happen sometimes. But if it happens a little too often for comfort, maybe it’s a hint that you need to think about how to get better at catching bugs as early as you can.