Re: [xml-dev] Re: XML As Fall Guy
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Gareth Oakes <[email protected]> wrote:
> It was a philosophy the whole team had bought into - I spoke about it to another team member and he said>> "It's the 80/20" rule. We can get 80% of the transformations we need this way">> I asked him how they were going to finish 100% of the project and he started looking intently at the screen.This struck a real chord with me. This attitude is not uncommon, and is usually accompanied by an impression that you can just "hand wave" the 20% away. Sadly, for fully automated systems, the 20% is often the bit you should be worried about and you should start by addressing that first. Perhaps that is the sort of knowledge that only experience can bring.
I liked that as well. 90% of software development is generally pretty routine. The value comes in being able to write that final 10%, or someone would already have come up with an automated solution. What makes it worse is that it is rare in most projects that you can tell, a priori, where or what that remaining 10% is going to be,
Kurt Cagle
Invited Expert, XForms Working Group, W3C
Invited Expert, XForms Working Group, W3C
Managing Editor, XMLToday.org
443-837-8725