Nirvana Fallacy

[swatts]

Bonjour Mon Amis,

Hope you all had a spiffing NIWeek if you attended. It looked splendid from my sad and lonely office!

I have reached perfect Twitter balance in that I have as many followers as people I follow on Twitter (it is on purpose and a bit of self analysis uncovered that it has to do with egalitarian OCD!). Someone I follow is James MacNally and he tweeted the following.

And it linked to the following excellent article and that article mentioned the Nirvana Fallacy which is a rather wonderful term for the subject of this article. (I was originally going to title it "People Ruin Everything").

The nirvana fallacy was given its name by economist Harold Demsetz in 1969 and refers to the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. In software it is characterised by requiring a "perfect" solution in areas where it is clearly unfeasible or even  impossible.

Software can be flexible OR easy to use. It is rarely, if ever, both.

Deliver it in 2 weeks AND be completely robust. Radically shortened timescales will affect the robustness.

We don't have any requirements but we expect a low fixed price and delivery date.

In many cases the drive for impossible perfection actually inhibits usable improvements being made. It's way better to deliver something useful and improve it. Similarly it is important to manage stakeholder expectations.

Pareto had life sussed when in 1896 he noticed that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. (I know that's not accurate but it's way better than saying the he published a paper etc etc). The Pareto Principle or the Law of the Vital Few helps to concentrate effort into the areas of maximum benefit. If you can offer 80% of the functionality in 20% of the time you really are onto a winner.

So the article was originally titled "People Ruin Everything" and it was going to be a diatribe on how you can put in all these fantastic processes, APIs, frameworks, methods etc and they stay fantastic until people come stomping in, with their great fat feet and balls everything up. In the Nirvana Fallacy I see an explanation for this, as a provider of these things we expect the user to be as perfect at using it as the designer is. Well they won't be!

I had a customer who would break everything I gave her, it was uncanny. But rather than get grumpy I made sure she was the first person to see any software I wrote, she was the worlds best software tester.

The moral of this most rambly of ramblings is don't expect perfection, you will only receive misery and frustration for your efforts. Improvement is a good expectation. Expect improvement!

Lots of Love

Steve