4-4-03 Practicing Simplicity
Discovering the simplest thing that could possibly work (an XP/Agile phrase) can
be incredibly difficult. Developing the BackTalk system has shown me this again
and again. The "simple, obvious solution" comes only after many iterations.
In the same vein, following the simplest practices can also be very difficult
and require a lot of discipline. At the conference Wednesday, I watched Ron
Jeffries do everything on 3x5 cards (his business cards are actually 3x5 cards
with grids on them; very clever). He was constantly taking notes and moving them
around, and I was trying to guess what the system was. This morning, Evan showed
me some of his first spontaneous attempts at creating user stories on cards,
decomposing them into tasks, and monitoring the time required for each task (It
also occurs to me that this would be very useful for consultant billing). He
said that it was helping him organize projects.
It seems to me that it's quite easy to overburden processes and make them
unusable, with the well-intentioned desire to make success more certain. One of
the benefits of XP/Agile methods, I believe, is that they don't try to pretend
that they can guarantee success, but instead they say "projects are risky, so
let's try something and find out, rather than creating a lot of artifacts in the
hope that they will tell us whether something will succeed."
