Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering

4 Vertical Slice

Some years ago, a regular client of mine asked me to come help with a project. When I arrived, I learned that a team had been working on a task for about half a year without getting anywhere.

Their task was indeed daunting, but they were stuck in Analysis Paralysis [15]. There were so many requirements that the team couldn’t figure out how to address them all. I’ve seen this happen more than once, with different teams.

Sometimes, the best strategy is to just get started. You should still think and plan ahead. There’s no reason to be wilfully nonchalant or blasé about thinking ahead, but just as too little planning can be bad for you, so can too much. If you’ve already established your deployment pipeline [49], the sooner you ...