"It's just a band-aid"

When I’ve heard (and let’s be honest, said) this, it’s usually lightly pejorative. Yes, we’ve done something about the problem, but we haven’t addressed the real issue.

By which is meant: usually the real technical or architectural issue or—hey, we’re really thinking about the big picture today!—the root policy or process issue leading whatever awful endpoint we’ve arrived at.

None of that is wrong! It’s all generally true. But it misses half of what band-aids are for: namely, they are a communication tool.

We all knew this as children, though most of us have forgotten. A band-aid tells people: I see that there is pain, and I’m doing something about it, and it’s going to be okay—and it does it tangibly.

Does this matter? Just ask any non-technical stakeholder watching a production error, or five-year-old with a scraped knee.