Clockwise Circles Towards the Heart
There’s a quite nice Japanese spa a bit outside Stockholm, where I once spent a night in a hotel room with a private Japanese bath. We were told about the Japanese bathing ceremony, and instructed to scrub ourselves with the supplied brushes, in clockwise circles towards the heart.
I don’t think there’s any physiological motivation for this, but I do think it’s beneficial to follow a Method. Following a method helps one focus on what one’s doing.
A few weeks back, I read the Q&A column on software development in Sweden’s largest IT journal, where someone asked something about UML. The expert, Kjell Almgren, finished his answer as follows (emphasis mine):
Today, we have finally chosen UML after having tried and discarded a number of candidate modelling standards along the way. Somehow, we have always been promised Nirvana, but that promise has never been kept. It’s important to emphasize that UML is here to stay…. All the major tool vendors support UML, so let’s hope that we get what we have been promised for so long: a uniform software development process.
Three months later, this last sentence lingers in my mind. Why do we need a process, again?