Simple design: The Best Way to Beat Bloat

One of the principal values of Agile Software Development is the priority given to working software. Agile development teams value working code over documentation, complex architectures, and other extraneous artifacts. This does not mean that Agile teams disregard these artifacts; it only means that they value working software more.

While the value of working software translates into many design and development practices, none may provide a more significant productivity boost than the practice of “Simple Design”. Whether you work in an agile or more traditional environment, simple design can be key to giving your team a major productivity boost.

Simple design means, to put it simply, designing software components in a way that meets only the requirements defined by the business. It encourages architectures that postpone the design and development of features until they are needed. By using this design technique, teams can minimize bloat and instead spend critical cycles on developing business critical features.

Eliminating code bloat means that team members are actually developing essential features instead of features that they assume will be needed in the future. This results in simple code that is easier to maintain. Bloat, especially when it includes complex designs, increases the potential for bugs, increases the maintenance associated with the feature, and reduces a team’s ability to easily add additional features. Furthermore, complex architectures often cause performance bottlenecks. Simple designs, on the other hand, eliminate performance tuning cycles and allow the team to focus on implementing new features rather than tuning existing code.

A critical part of implementing simple design on any team, however, is recognizing that the simplicity of a given design is often relative to the situation. A team’s skill set, a project’s functional requirements, and other factors all contribute to determining the simplicity of a design. What is simple for a team of C++ engineers developing embedded software, for example, may be significantly different from what is considered simple for a team of Java developers implementing a web application.

The bottom line is that a renewed focus on simple design can have a significant impact on a team’s productivity. Remembering to design and develop software that meets the requirements but does not introduce unneeded complexity will provide a team with more time to focus on developing new features and may also lead to fewer bugs and ultimately higher quality software.