The Spirit to Improve

This week in our weekly design committee, on of the developer demonstrated how to use the Saxon Injectors to create mock XQuery functions for unit testing.

It's been one of the biggest problem with our use of XQuery and the developer solved it in his spare time. It was a much needed reminder that the spirit to always improve the software and the development practices is at the core of a good and effective developer and team.

These kind of efforts always raise the bar that much higher in terms of the effectiveness and quality of what we produce and are life blood of the development effort. It is also a key indicator of a healthy project.

This kind work also serves to motivate us in the face of project delivery pressures and becomes even more important when we feel demotivated by repetitive work and the rush to meet the next deadline.