The coffee machine!

It was early in the morning, as soon as I entered in the class I could see some cardboards and water supply pipes lying on the tables in one corner of the class. Soon after the initial class lecture, teacher divided the class of 16 students into four groups each with 4 members.

The teacher suggested that each team is going to make a coffee machine and to increase the complexity of the task she mentioned that previously a group of students had made the coffee that she actually drank.

I started looking at the cardboards with a few water supply pipes and the whole process got me into serious thinking and questions started arising “How are we going to develop the coffee machine from these cardboards and on top of that coffee is actually drinkable?”

Finally, one of the members of the team started making some holes in the cardboard and started assuming that this is the place for cup holder and few more holes for putting the coffee beans and pipes were used for the water supply.

Somehow, we managed to make the sample coffee machine.

On the way back to college hostel in the evening, I kept on thinking about the whole exercise and its purpose. I started reflecting the thought process and tried to compare software engineering and conditions in the software development environment.

Soon after, I realised that my condition within the class reflected the condition within many software development environments. Where we stop working on the system and start thinking too much about the prefect solution and start appreciating the problem. Definitely, objective from the teacher must not have been the perfect coffee machine.  

One possible lesson of the whole exercise could have been to develop the minimum viable product based on the given resources and incrementally develop as per the client requirements. The other lesson could have been not to think too much about the problem and set the unrealistic solution which is practically not possible based on the given resources.

To conclude, to start with we do not have to think about the perfect solution but we have to start somewhere and slowly develop as we go along.