Don't Let Your Application Turn into Another Winchester Mystery House
Lee Atchison
Co-Founder & CTO, Product Genius Corporation. Thought Leader, Cloud Expert, Best Selling Author. O'Reilly Media, LinkedIn Learning. Host Software Engineering Daily. Ex-Amazon, Ex-AWS. softwarearchitectureinsights.com.
Have you seen the Winchester Mystery House?
Every developer, engineer, manager, or director of any modern application needs to see it.
What is it? It's a famous house built in San Jose, CA. It was once the home of Sarah Winchester, the heir of the Winchester Rifle fortune. Presumably, it's been haunted by the ghosts of those killed by Winchester guns.
Sarah Winchester began a lifelong process of changing, expanding, and growing the house. She added rooms here, stairways there, windows, doors...everywhere.
She kept building and building and building. But she did so without ever having a plan for what she wanted the house to be or what she wanted it to look like.
The result? Stairways that go to nowhere, windows that open into interior rooms. Basically, it's a mess. An unlivable mess. And now, of course, it is a tourist curiosity.
It's kind of like what happens with applications that don't have a plan. Using the excuse of Agile development, they keep adding features, capabilities, menus, pages, and buttons. And...it's nothing but a mess.
No plan. No organization. No purpose.
Don't let your application turn into another Winchester Mystery House.
Let the famous haunted house serve as a warning to those who would build applications without a clear vision of what they want as a finished product.
AI, Automation, Incident Management & Digital Operations Resiliency
1 年Keeping a seance room might make sense to keep in your app. That’s where sales & marketing can summon new features into existence to fulfill their promises to customers. You know…the ones that were never on the roadmap, nor was the dev team ever consulted about.