Re:Yagni (2015)
by hinkley on Monday August 13, 2018 @02:17PM
(#17752294)
The best phrase I've heard in this space is "Reversible decisions".
Any decisions that can be unmade later with relative ease, should be made as quickly as possible just to get them off the board (opportunity cost). If Do X vs Don't Do X is reversible, then YAGNI can apply - do whichever is cheaper and fix it later if you're wrong.
What pisses people off is when people try to block conversation on an irreversible decision by shouting YAGNI at you. There are a lot of adjectives for this behavior and none of them are good.
Reversible Decisions+YAGNI is pretty much your answer to the bikeshedding problem. Instead of wasting hours trying to decide what color to paint the shed, just budget painting it 5 times, and get back to figuring out if you can find a cheaper vendor to provide you millions of dollars worth of ultra high quality concrete. Or whether that crack the geologists found in the bedrock means you need a different site altogether.
Any decisions that can be unmade later with relative ease, should be made as quickly as possible just to get them off the board (opportunity cost). If Do X vs Don't Do X is reversible, then YAGNI can apply - do whichever is cheaper and fix it later if you're wrong.
What pisses people off is when people try to block conversation on an irreversible decision by shouting YAGNI at you. There are a lot of adjectives for this behavior and none of them are good.
Reversible Decisions+YAGNI is pretty much your answer to the bikeshedding problem. Instead of wasting hours trying to decide what color to paint the shed, just budget painting it 5 times, and get back to figuring out if you can find a cheaper vendor to provide you millions of dollars worth of ultra high quality concrete. Or whether that crack the geologists found in the bedrock means you need a different site altogether.