Dont Do That

Patient: Doctor, Doctor, it hurts every time I do this. [Patient flaps arms in an unnatural fashion while rapidly banging their head against left and right shoulders].

Doctor: Don't do that.

In other words, do not follow a methodology blindly. If some aspect of the methodology "hurts," DontDoThat.

This phrase occurs often in PerlLanguage books.

[WARNING: CYNICISM ALERT] This is used as Yet Another RedHerring whenever somebody complains about some portion of a methodology that is not working.

When someone issues the ItHurtsWhenWeDoThis? complaint, listen carefully, as there is often embedded in the complaint a huge clue to the source of the problem.

e.g. "Whenever I allocate a buffer and return its address from a function I notice that my program crashes 30 minutes later."

I recently reported a bug to another team ("this method has the wrong semantics, when you call it with these kind of arguments, bad things will happen") and got a DontDoThat response. sigh