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The Gardening Metaphor

During the lockdown over the last 4 months, I’ve taken up gardening. When I first started reading about agile software development, a lot of analogies for software development came from the world of construction. I guess it was a simple comparison that started due to the engineering nature of software development, but to this day we keep saying we are “building” software. There are several other analogies that people have used over the years like building a car (the famous skateboard => bicycle => car diagram) or the one with the “Monalisa” picture. I guess these analogies are sufficient in… Read More »The Gardening Metaphor

Features V/s Sophistication

Usefulness of software:Letting the user do what s(he) wants easily and fast. Features:Number of activities a user can perform with the software. Sophistication:Software intelligence which simplifies user interactions. Software, like anything else follows the laws of Diminishing Marginal Utility. Here are the graphs as per my experience with software (Not as a software professional but as a simple user) FeaturesI think the marginal utility of adding more “features” to the software diminishes at a much higher rate. Firstly because individual users don’t use all the features but have to pay the price, in terms of money as well as processing… Read More »Features V/s Sophistication