I was reading my son the Berenstain Bears, The Bear Scouts the other night and at one point in the book, the father bear decides to take the short way to the scout camp, where as the bear scouts decide to follow their scout guide and take the long way. The father bear very quickly runs into alligators and almost gets bitten. It got me thinking that with Agile, DevOps, basically every modern methodology that I have come across, we always try to do it the short way. We try to find the shortcut. We try to do things without fully understanding, just enough to get us into trouble. Sometimes we get somewhere, but usually in the long run taking the short way comes and bites us.

I feel that if it matters, that only by doing the hard work, can you get the full benefit. Shortcuts get you incremental benefits at best, but without understanding.