July 2003
Intermediate to advanced
106 pages
2h 11m
English
Content preview from Extreme Programming Pocket GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 18. You Aren’t Gonna Need It
The phrase Chapter 18 is a reminder to do today’s work today and tomorrow’s work tomorrow. It’s tempting to work on future requirements, but it is risky to invest in features that may be necessary at the expense of features that are necessary now. Spending time and resources on one task leaves less time and fewer resources for other tasks. Implement only the features you need when you need them.
The temptation to build in extra flexibility comes from two motivations. The first is fear. Many software projects are brittle and inflexible. Dragons lurk in dusty, dark corners. A simple bugfix may have repercussions throughout the codebase. Practicing XP with discipline can conquer this fear. Your tests will allow you to make changes with confidence. Refactoring will keep your code flexible. Doing the simplest thing that could possibly work will produce understandable and changeable code.
The second motivation is the desire to work on “interesting bits.” Exploring the latest and greatest new library or fine-tuning a complicated new algorithm can be exciting. However, writing code for an unrequested and unscheduled feature undermines the customer’s business authority just as the customer mentally halving your estimates undermines your judgment.
Anticipating future needs is gambling. If the customer someday actually requests an unrequested feature, will it take the same shape as when you first thought of it? Will the customer even ever ask for the feature? ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.