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Planning vs. prototyping

The process of software engineering has two aspects: creative and social. Neglecting the social aspect leads to products that nobody can understand, support or use. Neglecting the creative aspect leads to total waste of resources and products that never ship. In this post I propose a simple formula that helps to strike the right balance between the two.

Let \(T_i\) is time needed to write the code demonstrating the approach, \(T_r\) is time needed to rollback the code, if the approach does not work, and \(T_d\) is time needed to discuss whether the approach will work, then the following inequality must hold:

\[ T_d \leq T_i + T_r \]

tagged: rant