Counter Drift and Entropy with Kaizen

I picked up a term that I have not used in all my years of programming, and I love it: “Drift”. As in “Specificaiton Drift”: you write the spec at time T, implement at T+1, learn something new about the problem domain in the process and adjust your implementation (you know, normal programming) at T+2, then at T+3 the spec doesn’t reflect the reality of the code base anymore. But also “Knowledge Drift”, which maybe nobody uses as a term: where our personal understanding of the code is not up to snuff with reality. Maybe because teammates changed things during our vacation; maybe just because the system is too large to really know. The fix to software entropy, to our lack of full understanding (which technically is unachievable in large, complex systems, but our brain fools us with a sense of familiarity anyway), always was and will be to stay vigilant. The principle of Kaizen, of continuous improvement as an attitude, also likened to the Boy Scout Rule of cleaning up litter as you…