Let us start with an allegorical tale. Imagine you are in NYC, and you need to get to Boston. You go online, read some blogs, attend some lectures, and learn that best practice means getting in your car for 4 hours. You go climb in your car, and sit for 4 hours. You open your door expecting to find yourself outside Faneuil Hall, but find yourself still just outside your house.

You think to yourself, “how am I still where I started, I followed all the best practices for how to get to Boston, but failed!” So you go online, and after a few more hours of research, you find that all the experienced travelers use AssAligner to make sure they are positioned correctly, so you sign up. You even pay for AssAligner Pro so each member of your family can have a seat license.

Your confidence buoyed, you again go out, get in your car, and wait. 4 hours later, you get out and again find yourself right where you started. “Unbelievable!” Back online you go, diving deep on CarOverflow, and even reaching out to AssAligner support for guidance. All your research leads you to a conclusion that you really must adopt a suite of monitoring tools. After a few days comparing vendors, you go with VehiPro. Your car is so full of sensors now you also need to hire someone just to make sure they all keep working, so you bring on Joe.

“Today, we’re getting to Boston,” you think. You get in your car. You call Joe to make sure all your telemetry looks good. And you sit for 4 hours.

All of these tools and services in this story are YAST, Yet Another Specialized Tool. All are adopted to Do Things Right and Follow Best Practices, but we get so focused on the details of The Right Way we forget to see if we’re actually addressing the problem we have, or just the proximate standin therefor. We follow the actions of those who report success without really stopping to understand if their situations and motivations match our own, all the while adopting more and more things that make actually accomplishing our goals more and more complicated.

Consider this story, then look at your CI pipeline, your testing strategy, or your infrastructure solutions. Are you making choices that meet your challenges and needs, or are you spending time trying to do the thing some FAANG does when they encounter your class of problem The Right Way.