Sep 7, 2011

software project complexity

You are always wrong about the complexity of the project.

You overestimate it, and have been from the beginning. I'm not speaking of the resources needed for implementation, but rather about complexity for understanding (and almost always more resources as a consequence).

It's only that you don't know or have the right tools and you have much more complex understanding of the project. Your design is overengineered. You build a framework for representing graphs etc when a 20-line algorithm would do. Some of the tasks you are solving are no tasks actually with the right toolbox.

If you knew its actual complexity, you'd laugh at how much time and effort is spent at the project, and also how many people work on it. You think — what? Due to some lack of time the way you do is maybe 20% more complex than it would be if only you had time for analysis? Bullshit. It's 10 or 100 times more complex. The problem is other people have an even worse idea.

Following K.I.S.S might be right: there are less variants among simple implementations, and yours is one of them.