Do No Harm: A Blast from the Past

I stumbled across a five-year-old blog post of mine yesterday.  It caught my eye because it's title matched one of the themes of one of my talks at WindyCityRails.  As I wrote in my last post, I've picked up on an analogy that Uncle Bob has been writing and talking about for a the last couple years.  Well, it turns out that my attraction to this analogy was not due to the novelty of thinking that the craft of software development is analogous to the practice of medical surgery.  The idea may have resonated with me because it is mentioned in one of the great books of our field, by one of our most experienced practitioners.  My old blog post quoted the first edition of Code Complete (1993) which quoted Jerry Weinberg saying:

"Opening up a working system is more like opening up a human brain and replacing a nerve than opening up a sink and replacing a washer. Would maintenance be easier if it was called 'Software Brain Surgery?'"

This supports Pete McBreen's assertion in Software Craftsmanship that it's absolutely ridiculous that so many teams entrust the "maintenance" of software assets to our least experienced developers.  The strength of this analogy seems to be growing (in my mind at least), and I wonder how it might inform our work in other ways?