Curiosity

If I had to pick one quality that I think is necessary to make a big software project run smoothly, it is curiosity.

If you get 100% code that perfectly fits to the domain problems, the project will be great. If you correctly guessed how long it would take in advance, and people actually believed you and gave you that time, the politics would be negligible. 

But anyone who has been on a bunch of big projects for a long time knows that it almost never works that way.

It’s usually some sort of dumpster fire. The time isn’t enough, the fit is bad, and the technology is flaky.

So, ultimately, for the first few versions of the code, you do what you need to do in order to get it out the door. It ain’t pretty but it seems to be an inescapable reality of the job.

But after that smoke clears, and if there is still an appetite to go forward, the circumstances have changed. Hopefully, there is confidence in the work now.

Curious people will look back and what happened earlier, and what they have, and start asking the hard questions. Why did someone do that? How is that supposed to work? etc. 

If they are curious and enabled, then at least some of the huge collection of smaller problems that plague the earlier versions are now in their focus. And they will get looked at, and hopefully corrected. All of that happens outside of the main push for whatever new features other people desire. 

It is fundamentally cleanup work. There is a lot of refactoring, or replacement of weak parts. There is more investigation, and deep diving into the stranger issues. All of which is necessary in order to build more on what is there now.

Non-curious people will just claim that something is already in production, that it is locked that way, and it should not be touched, ever. They will enshrine the damage, and try to move on to other things. That is a classic mistake, building anything on a shaky foundation is a waste of time. But you have to be curious about the foundation in order to be able to assess that it is not as good as necessary.