(2023-11-30) Bjarnason From Yellow: Gall's Law

Baldur Bjarnason: From 'Yellow': Gall's Law. One of my favourite laws – one of those principles that seem to be universally applicable – is Gall’s Law. People who have worked with me in the past are probably very tired of hearing about it.

Systemantics: Everybody who works in software should read it and be filled with despair. Because it will fill you with despair. You will recognise everything written in this text from 1975, to your horror.

I have never seen anybody manage to break John Gall’s Law.

the alternative that I always advocate is to try to bake evolution into your design. It’s fine to have a complex system design that you’re aiming for in the long term, but you need to have a clear idea of how it will evolve from a simple system that works to a complex system that works.

If you’re making an app, make a simple, bare bones, flawed but working app. It can be flawed in that parts of it are obviously missing.

But the systematic aspect of it, the code, that needs to be working, and it needs to be simple.

I have almost never been able to convince a manager that we should do it.

They say, yeah, absolutely. I believe in a minimum viable product.

But then they keep adding things to what constitutes the minimum, and they don’t realise that MVP is not the simple system that John Gall is talking about.

The simple system does not have to be shipped.

It just has to exist as the foundation that you build on. But they don’t really get that when they’re managing the project.

They almost always start with this vision of a complex interlocking thing we’re just colouring in the numbers for.