News
A Bright New Day,
9 November 2011
Some fantanic news items for our members and in fact all beach patrons.
Last night the City of Port Phillip voted unanimously to ban smoking on our beaches. This will become effective as of December 1st 2010 via the roll out of a
"no cuts no butts" policy similar to that adopted by the Surf Coast Shire.
3206 Beach Patrol has received a personal letter of support from The Premier of Victoria Mr John Brumby. (see
below). Mr Brumby has also pledged $7500 for us to continue and expand our efforts. Enormous thanks to our local MP Martin Foley for his help with this.
A huge congratulations and thanks to all our members, sponsors and associated groups We truly can look forward to safer, cleaner and healthier beaches.
Clean Up Australia Day, 7 March 2010
3206 Beach Patrol is now a part of Clean Up Australia Day web site.
We invite all existing and potential members to sign up here and get involved.
Click here to visit us at CleanUpAustraliaDay.org.au
Emerald Hill Weekly Article, 3 February 2010
Emerald Hill Weekly Article, 23 December 2009
An Invitation To All 3206 Residents
3206 Beach Patrol wishes to invite all residents and friends to our launch this Sunday the 13th of December at 8am.
For further details please click the invitation below.
The Broken Window Theory
Don't Live with Broken Windows
A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
By Bill Venners
Bill Venners: What is the broken window theory?
Andy Hunt: Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods
escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same demographics
and economic makeup—would become a hell hole where the cops were scared to go in.
They wanted to figure out what made the difference.
The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in
the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to
see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days,
and nothing happened. It wasn't touched. So they went up and broke a little window
on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was
turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works.
They did more studies and developed a "Broken Window Theory." A window gets broken
at an apartment building, but no one fixes it. It's left broken. Then something
else gets broken. Maybe it's an accident, maybe not, but it isn't fixed either.
Graffiti starts to appear. More and more damage accumulates. Very quickly you get
an exponential ramp. The whole building decays. Tenants move out. Crime moves in.
And you've lost the game. It's all over.
We use the broken window theory as a metaphor for managing technical debt on a project.
Bill Venners: What is technical debt?
Andy Hunt: That's a term from Ward's Wiki. (See Resources.) Every time you
postpone a fix, you incur a debt. You may know something is broken, but you don't
have time to fix it right now. Boom. That goes in the ledger. You're in debt. There's
something you've got to fix. Like real debt, that may be fine if you manage it.
If you've got a couple of those—even a lot of those—if you're on top of it, that's
fine. You do a release get it out on time. Then you go back and patch a few things
up. But just like real debt, it doesn't take much to get to the point where you
can never pay it back, where you have so many problems you can never go back and
address them.
Dave Thomas: My current metaphor for that is my email inbox. Because I have
this habit every now and then of not answering email for a while. And then it gets
to the point round about the 250 message mark, where I suddenly realize, I'm never
going to answer these messages. And it is the same with pending changes in software.
Bill Venners: How does technical debt relate to the broken window theory?
Andy Hunt: You don't want to let technical debt get out of hand. You want
to stop the small problems before they grow into big problems. Mayor Guiliani used
this approach very successfully in New York City. By being very tough on minor quality
of life infractions like jaywalking, graffiti, pan handling—crimes you wouldn't
think mattered—he cut the major crime rates of murder, burglary, and robbery by
about half over four or five years.
In the realm of psychology, this actually works. If you do something to keep on
top of the small problems, they don't grow and become big problems. They don't inflict
collateral damage. Bad code can cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage unrelated
to its own function. It will start hurting other things in the system, if you're
not on top of it. So you don't want to allow broken windows on your project.
As soon as something is broken—whether it is a bug in the code,
a problem with your process, a bad requirement, bad documentation—something you
know is just wrong, you really have to stop and address it right then and there.
Just fix it. And if you just can't fix it, put up police tape around it. Nail plywood
over it. Make sure everybody knows it is broken, that they shouldn't trust it, shouldn't
go near it. It is as important to show you are on top of the situation as it is
to actually fix the problem. As soon as something is broken and not fixed, it starts
spreading a malaise across the team. "Well, that's broken. Oh I just broke that.
Oh well."