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“Better is worse than good enough” (or the Dutch equivalent “Beter is slechter dan goed genoeg”) has been my tagline for quite some time. I put it below emails, use it on this blog and anywhere else where it seems applicable. BTW, I don’t deserve the credits, I first heard this quote from professor emeritus Nielen (not sure if he is the authentic source either).

Many people are confused when they read it and ask me what it means. How can better be worse? Better is better, right? And certainly better than good enough, right? Wrong.

The statement reflects pragmatism. Simplicity. Or, as Einstein put it: “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -and a lot of courage- to move in the opposite direction.”

It feels counter intuitive. We always want to make things better. But think of this: a better solution might be, uhm…, better, but it has at least three major disadvantages:

1. It takes more time to make things better – we don’t have this time
2. It costs more money to make things better – we don’t have the money
3. It has a higher probability on errors – which cost time and money to fix

In software development, we tend to “gold plate” solutions and include all kinds of bells and whistles that will “certainly blow away our customer”. Will this customer really be delighted by those bells and whistles if it means that his project is over budget and too late?

The trick is to hit the sweet spot between “too little” and “too much”. The only way to know that spot is to get frequent feedback -early and often- from your customer. This is one of the core principles of agile software development: close collaboration between development and customers. Scrum implements this principle with the Product Owner role, collaborating closely with the team, delivering software in short Sprints, ending with a Sprint Review of working software.

Now you know what I mean with “better is worse than good enough”. Try it for yourself!

Photo taken from wallyg under Creative Commons license.

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1. Agile Design Is Not Generic

Tags: collaboration, planning, pragmatism, scrum, simplicity

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 16:16 and is filed under Development, Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.