The universe works agains us - entrophy!

I've been reading Stephen Hawking's The Theory of Everything this morning. He explains the entropy of black holes.

Between the lines, I was able to understand that entropy, understood as, chaos or lack of order, rises constantly. It rises because time elapses...

I got enlighted: the project or code, left alone, will get worse in time, when we do nothing.
A simple act of abstaining from action, lack of management, lack of trying to bring order, makes things worse.
This of course is just a analogy, not a law. But let's examine it..

Lack of action = lack of order

Example 1
The team works hard on developing the system. In the meantime, the test acceptance phrase takes place, and 50 bugs are reported.
The team continues the work on developing, neglecting the bugs - "we'll do it later".

That simple decission makes things worse. How? 
* broken windows (Pragmatic programmer)
* programmer is no longer responsible for delivering working code, since some things do not work already
* overall quality drops rapidly because of attitude
Lack of constant quality requirements (lack of order) makes things worse.

Example 2
The team works serveral months on a project now, and 150 bug/improvement issues are due. The project is near the deadline. The huge amount of work is discouraging - no light in a tunnel, no hope to do a good job.
For political reasons, dropping some functionality in a trade-off for quality is not going to happen. That would be a great, wise decision, but such wisdom would require a single, strong leader. This isn't happening in big bank corporations (our client is one).

I proposed some rearrangement of tasks for developers in yesterday's article; here is the summary:
A developer is required to finish the overall process/part of the system - develop all changes, fixes and improvements. He/she then signalises: "that part of the system is done".
The amount of work does not change, but the "getting work done" attitude gets a huge positive kick. The hope is restored.
Moreover, even when not everything could be done before deadline, at least most parts of the system will work perfectly.

Another example, how simple act of ordering of tacks, brings quality to the project.
And how abstaining from action, brings more trouble.

Entropy is your enemy.

 Do something, manage some change, bring order, rethink tasks... or face failure.