A senior monk of the Laughing Monkey Clan, exasperated by
the poor quality of his team’s code, was advised to seek the
counsel of the nun Zjing who lived in the valley below. He
found her tending the Temple’s sheep in the high pasture.
“What have you tried?” asked the nun.
“I have left copies of our Standards and Practices in every
cubicle,” said the monk. “Each morning I send out links to
pertinent software engineering articles, and each evening I
review the day’s code. Still nothing changes. Each monk
commits the same errors as he did the day before, and the
codebase grows ever uglier.”
Zjing leaned on her staff and gazed absently into the
distance.
Finally she said: “The shepherd cannot move the flock; only
the sheep can do that.”
The senior monk frowned. “I do not see.”
Zjing picked up a small stone and hurled it at a black-faced
ram which stood at the edge of the flock. The stone struck
the ram’s ear, whereupon the animal bleated and trotted
away. Its neighbors promptly followed, then their neighbors,
and so on, until the entire wooly herd flowed like sea-foam
down the hillside. Zjing walked with them.
The senior monk folded his arms and remained on the hilltop,
unconvinced. “Even if I can correct one monk, why should the
clan follow him if they do not follow me?”
“Wú,” said Zjing, throwing a stone at the fellow. “It is not
the monks you should be herding, but the code. Some of it
strides forward with purpose, but most simply follows what
came before. One monk’s IDE generates a poor method
skeleton, a second monk copies the finished method
throughout the class, a third saves the class under a
different name for his own purposes...”
The nun found her way to the black-faced ram and stroked its
bloodied ear. “Your codebase is the errant sheep,” she
called back to the senior monk. “Correct it, and the
laziness of your monks will prove a great virtue.”
