From time to time I come across a problem that I don’t know how to solve but that I’m certain someone else must have already solved. One of the benefits that experience brings is that it’s relatively safe to make the inference that if a problem seems interesting or important, someone else has already taken a whack at it publicly: it’s a big internet out there, and in software engineering, many of our paths are well-trodden.
As a result, if a team experiences a problem, investigates solutions, and comes up short on solutions or prior art, it will fail the smell test for me most days. It is very unlikely you are the first person or team to have run into this. You should start with the assumption that a solution does exist if for no other reason than that it wouldn’t make any sense it didn’t, and you’re unlikely to be the only person to want it. I expect the outcome to most investigations to fall into a few categories. In descending order of likelihood, either:
- You’re trying to solve the problem the wrong way, or
- The problem simply isn’t very important, or is important to you but fairly specific to your constraints, or
- Every other existing solution is simply junk, or
- Maybe, genuinely, no one else has thought of doing this.
Many of these fall into the category of “fair enough, I buy it,” but my next question is going to be what you learned about your problem by doing the research. The lower in the list you go, though, the higher the bar is to prove that you’re right. If you go digging and tell me that you think the right answer is #4, I’m going to be pretty skeptical, and the bar for proof will be high; much of the time, if it seems like a fairly common and obvious problem, the next step should be to go back and dig harder.
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