Scripting Complexity vs. Simplicity

Note: Most of my blog posts are technical items that relate to performing a specific task or fixing a specific error. This one is more of an opinion piece. So, if my arguments sound reasonable, take the advice. If you disagree, by all means, go your own way.

I am a big believer that I need to understand the details of any script I run in a production environment. Unless that script is from Microsoft and provided to perform a specific task (such as migrating public folders), I will go through a script line by line to verify I understand it. This even applies to my own scripts. If I haven’t used a script for several months, I’ll review it before I use it again to make sure I know exactly what it’s doing.

I expect that most system administrators operate with the same requirement to understand the scripts they are running. At least I hope they do. I don’t want anyone blindly running a script I created without understanding the script and knowing what it will do in their environment.

So, from my perspective, running a script is very different from running a program/utility. A program is distributed as an executable and you simply need to trust the developer. I don’t need to trust a script writer if I can understand what the script is doing. The writer just saved me the effort of creating the script myself. It’s much faster to review and verify an existing script than it is to create one.

Simple is good, right?

If you need to understand a script, then simple is good. However, we often attempt want a script to be resilient to user error. That is, we want the script to do things like:

• Not accept invalid values
• Not make incorrect/invalid changes to objects
• Warn when mistakes are about to be made

A more user-friendly script is good, but it becomes more complex and more difficult to interpret. So, does that mean complexity is good?

Know your audience

The balance of simple (but you need to know what your doing) and complex (with lots of error checking) depends on your audience. If the audience needs to understand the details of your script, then simplicity is better. If the audience does not care about the details inside the script then simplicity is less important. For example, if the help desk staff in your organization run standardized scripts to complete some specific tasks then user friendly is more important than simplicity. The help desk staff will be running the script without reviewing the contents or understanding how it works. So, if they give an invalid value, you need to account for that in your script. It’s worthwhile to make it user friendly to prevent errors in the production environment.

The customers I work with typically will look at my scripts before running them. So, these scripts need to be relatively short and understandable. The documentation that I provide for running these scripts also needs to be short and understandable. In this case simplicity is most important for the audience. For example, if there are several tasks that need to be accomplished such as updating email addresses, UPNs, etc. I will create separate scripts for each task. This makes each individual script easier to understand and document.

Striking a balance

I tend to work with customers that have varying knowledge levels and needs. Some of them would run a script without looking and others want a detailed understanding how the scripts work. I want my scripts to work in both scenarios. So, I need to put in some of the user-friendly bits like prompting for values when required and some basic checking for invalid values, but I don’t try to account for every possible error. To account for every possible error would be too much complexity.

Because I can’t (or won’t) put in tons of error checking, one thing I often do is display a confirmation on screen before performing an action. For example, I have a script to remove email addresses for a specified domain. Before script performs the action, it displays on screen the pattern being searched for and provides an email address from the first mailbox as an example of what is about to be removed. The script also displays the number of mailboxes that are being modified. Displaying this information allows the user to provide a final sanity check before approving removal from all mailboxes.

To make scripts more understandable, I use lots of comments that describe what each section of a script is doing.  This is useful for customers that want to review the script. It’s also useful for me when I want to review the script contents or modify the script. Embedding comment-based help in a script makes it easier to use, but detailed comments in the script are better for understanding how it works.

If you don’t get the right balance then your scripts won’t get used. That help desk person will think your script generates errors all the time and ignore it. The administrators you gave complex scripts to will build their own because they can’t understand yours.