How to KISS your project!

The secrets of successful software engineers and managers.

No, no. don’t misunderstand, Keep your lips away from your laptop! It doesn’t mean kissing it with love. Although after running the tips of this article, You might be kissed by your crew, Whether out of love or out of respect!

Anyway, we all know who the software engineer is. But we want more scrutiny.

If you write code that the computer understands and runs. It is admirable. But trying to write code that people read and realize is a step forward. Being a project manager is somehow like this. Sometimes everything is working, but not in the best way possible.

A technical team, IT company or anything like them, have costs. so be sure that your boss will welcome the tasks to be done quickly. But, how can we do it?

The first and foremost principle is to KISS it!

KISS, an acronym for “keep it simple, stupid” or “keep it stupid simple”, is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided. The phrase has been associated with aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson The term “KISS principle” was in popular use by 1970 Variations on the phrase include: “Keep it simple, silly”, “keep it short and simple”, “keep it simple and straightforward”, “keep it small and simple”, or “keep it stupid simple”

-Credits: wikipedia-

As you know, Simplicity is beautiful in everything. But beauty is not our only goal here. When it comes to software development, changes are inevitable, And there is no guarantee that the changes will be made by someone who wrote the code for the first time himself. Well … what should happen now? For a task that may take up to 3 hours, a week of code review is not naturally appropriate.

And the main question is: what do we actually mean by Simple?

First: If you want to go down the street, no matter how rich you are, a helicopter is too much!

Yes! It’s not always necessary to use the best things and tools. Think about what you need and what you want to do.

So, the first step is choosing the right technology. for instance, if you need a simple blog, is it a good idea to use django? Of course it works, but the better idea is using a CMS like wordpress. Simple, quick and sufficient. That was all.

Second: Don’t reinvent the wheel!

What do i mean? Let’s check wikipedia again:

To reinvent the wheel is to duplicate a basic method that has already previously been created or optimized by others.

Github is enough. Isn’t it? A large repository of all what you may need! All you’re gonna need is to do a search and see if what you want to develop is already developed or not!

Thirt: a football team just need one goalkeeper

It’s not important how many you have, some roles can not be assigned to more than a specific number of people. Here we understand expanding the team is not a way to grow the project. Sometimes we can call it wasting money.

Fourth: the first priority to spend money, should be where you can earn money then

Imagine a situation where you have an amount of money and you want to buy something.

What will you think about buying? Clothes? A new car? Or the recently released iPhone?

We can expand this subject beyond personal situations. Let me talk with an example,

You’ve got a new investor, or you have a great increase in sales. What will you do with the money? Advertisement? Buy new laptops for the team? Hiring new engineers? Or impower servers? Depends on your own.

Fifth: start reading the article from begining!