The need for simplicity
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Simplicity —
“the harmony of nothing that is not needed, and everything that is.”
Simplicity is integral to agility. It appears:
- as one of the 12 principles behind the Manifesto for Agile Software Development:
“Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.”
- as one of Kent Beck's four values of XP:
“What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?”
- In the Scrum framework itself:
“Scrum is simple. Doing Scrum is hard.”
Simply put, Agile's bet on simplicity is that lower cost, faster delivery, and earlier feedback trumps cost of potential rework in the future.
The grounding of simplicity is perhaps best expressed by Albert Einstein:
“everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”
When was the last time you looked at your product ecosystem from the perspective of simplicity? Is it time to look at it again?
† Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press , 1977, p. 390
†† Beck, Kent. Extreme Programming Explained. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 2000, p. 30
