Larry Wall, the creator of Perl (a very popular programming language) says that the three virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.
As a project team, you always want to “Maximize the work that you don’t have to do”. This does not mean that you are lazy, either in the negative sense or even in the strict Larry Wall sense. What it means is that you are actively identifying the areas of low-value work that you could reasonably do in the course of the project, and INTENTIONALLY NOT DOING THEM.

By specifically identifying the things that you aren’t doing (the anti-requirements, so to speak), you are doing two things:
1) Reinforcing the focus and scope of the real work at hand
2) Taking a second pass through the out-of-scope activities to ensure that they are not required.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Focus, Introduction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.