Hail The Reference Implementation, Slayer Of Gurus

If you work in software development, gurus with silver bullet suggestions are around every corner. In a previous post, I mentioned how effectively, asking for a Reference Implementation can resolve the angst caused by these suggestions.

While I did not connect the dots at the time, I experienced this effect first hand in a prior project. I was in a liason role and there was an all powerful consultant (APC) from venerated Vendor (Microsoft, not that it matters all vendors do this). No matter what the problem was the APC always had that combination of Vendor silver bullets would fix the problem.

The scary side of the equation was no one knew what he was talking about and we were not sure if he was brilliant or just making stuff up. At one point, he had convinced us that a critical problem with one part of the Vendors stack could be resolved be a particular combination of silver bullets in other Vendor items.

At the following meeting with my consulting company, I brought up a particular silver bullet festooned boondogle and asked what should I do. Fortunately there was an older and wiser consultant advising us and he said, "Just ask for a simple reference project showing the ideas implemented". This I did.

For a while I waited eagerly for the demo. When it never came, I realized I could ignore the suggestion and what was better, I have been using this management trick ever since.