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PLANNING_FOR_TROUBLE
September 5, 2007
Some tarnished bullets:
o Centralized systems can lead to big failures.
Avoid having critical components.
o This also applies to human beings: leaders need to
delegate, to recruit assistants.
o Experiments should be kept small. If successful,
work on scaling them up next time.
o Pin down what can be pinned down relatively early:
Draw diagrams (e.g. floorplans).
Make numeric estimates (e.g. hours of manual labor).
o Tasks under adverse conditions can take 2x longer
of more, and adverse conditions are common.
Where possible, do pre-assembly, test equipment, etc.
Parts break. People get sick. Orders get lost.
These problems are inevitable:
the question is how well you
can deal with them.
But then, things like
this are easy to say,
but not always so easy
to comply with.
Redundancy has it's costs,
and a new project may need
Plans and estimates are nice, but to do without for a time.
do you need to revise them under
every little change in the scheme?
If so, you can spend your life on
the revisions. If not, they become
useless pretty quickly.
It sometimes seems like
an effective strategy to
(In XP doctrine, delay decision making as
they call this late as possible so you
YAGNI: "you ain't really know which
gonna need it", decisions need to be made.
i.e. don't go
beyond the I've had the experience
minimum until you of repeatedly re-working
know you have to.) mechanical drawings with
elaborate solutions to a
problem, where a simpler
(but notably, harder to
draw) solution emerged
later during assembly.
Sometimes you need
to stop planning and
just play with the blocks.
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