Getting it right for the last time

Software design can have a number of different methodologies. The first is a waterfall spec where everything is planned beforehand and then the software is executed. I will call this the Alfred Hitchcock method. He planned everything out before he shot any film. The other extreme is what is know in the software industry as agile or extreme programming. The boys at 37 signals are fans of this method. I call the Casablanca Method. They were writing the script as they shot the film, sometimes rewriting scenes while the actors waited.

What got me thinking about this were two different issues. One is the new “great new feature” that the folks at 37 signals released. It is called 37SignalsID. What a STUPID idea. The idea is that they give their users a common login for all of their products. This is a hack because of the method they used to design their software. They believed in keeping it simple, but what happened is that they kept it too simple. Hence they had to spend a hugh amount of time to build a hack to integrate their programs. If they had just thought ahead, and slowed down a bit and planned it out they could have gotten it right the first time, instead of the last.

Another example of this is my competitors at Deltek. Due to their strategy of acquisitions, they are forced to deal with all kinds of legacy problems. The fact that they were integrating an acquired CRM application with another acquired accounting package, together know as Deltek Vision has caused them all sorts of issues. Like having to only have one client contact for a Client in the accounting side and to duplicate the record and contact in the CRM side. Just plain dumb. If they actually rebuilt the app carefully, then this and all sorts of problems might have been avoided.

I am slowly becoming a proponent of a third way. Build it slow, but build it right. Think it through and bite the bullet. This has slowed us down but we are now able to quickly roll out great new functionality without having to deal with stupid decisions we made in the past because we were in a hurry.