Sour Systems, or Simple Systems?
James Governor links to a great post on the need for simplicity:
Adrian then hits on a great point:
Why does Sainsbury have an "elaborate system" where surely a simple system would suffice?
I love that. The argument (or recieved wisdom) that elaborate means better is nonsense.
In IT we hear it about things like PHP all the time. Oh no - what you really want is a more scalable system (in enterprise software that invariably means a more elaborate one). Sometimes however there is an argument for lesscode, less software.
Elaboration tend to mask and degare responsibility because you can blame the system if something goes wrong. [We'll see a lot of that in the next couple of months].
Exactly. This goes straight to the point I made yesterday as well - do you want the complex (and supposedly scalable) system a long time from now, or the simple one that works right away? Too many IT people always gravitate toward the former, regardless of what the use case is.
Comments
If you don't know where you've been how will you know where you're going...
[Mel] September 7, 2005 16:14:25.301
I'm not sure where I got that quote from but I think it applys to complex systems as well. Please bare with me:
If we can all agree that applications spend most of their time being extended and maintained then it goes to reason that if the application is large and complex it will take longer to extend and maintain. The reason: the poor developer tasked with making the application better is forced to wade through its complexity in order to know what can and can not be changed (ok in an ideal world the developer will spend the time doing this and in an ideal world the application will have sufficient documentation too). However, having existed in reality for a couple of years, experience has taught me the validity of another quote I picked up at my first job: If you don't spend the time to understand what you're changing you'll always have that time fixing your bugs.
As always, just my observations from the peanut gallery. --Mel