Insight: If it’s been done “except for…

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Realized by Ryan on July 19 2010:

If it’s been done “except for this one thing” for days, there’s likely a design problem with that one thing.

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5 comments so far

Jagath Narayan 19 Jul 10

Great insight. This exactly happened to us two weeks ago. :)

We kept pushing out a feature extension (“partial shipments on orders”) that the customers had been asking for, mainly because it didn’t intuitively fit into the base feature (“single shipment on orders”)

Eventually, it became a nagging pain, and when we finally sat down to tackle it, we realized that it didn’t fit in because the base feature was designed incorrectly. And when we solved that design issue, everything else fell neatly into place.

Douglas T 19 Jul 10

Maybe not a design problem, but definitely a fundamental flaw of some sort.

Lee McAlilly 20 Jul 10

Wouldn’t that fundamental flaw be a design problem?

ABasketOfPups 21 Jul 10

Doesn’t have to be. Maybe the design was fine, but the implementation was awkward. Or did the design fail to lead to a good implementation? This could go around for a while. :)