One day a centipede was rambling along the forest floor, thinking about nothing in particular. All of a sudden he hears a little voice saying “Excuse me, but how on earth do you manage to do that?”

“How do I manage to do what?” says the centipede.

“How do you manage to coordinate all those 100 legs so that you can walk easily?”

“I don’t know,” said the centipede, “I never thought about it much. I guess that I… I move… I take this foot and I… ” The centipede promptly falls over, never to walk again.

This story illustrates a very simple truth – a lot of things work just fine until you stop and try to analyze each individual part of the whole. Too much focus on tiny tactics often leads to failure of the overall strategy.

The Centipede’s Dilemma sometimes comes to mind as I watch a software development team progress through the project lifecycle.

At the first stages of the analysis and design phases, the team agrees on the primary goals and the basic features and functions necessary to meet those goals. The strategic solution produced is often simple, efficient, and elegant.

As the weeks (or months) pass, each team member starts to over-think, and each fragment of the solution is taken apart, re-analyzed, and independently tweaked. Each interaction is individually refined and every possible exception case is accounted for.

Then the pieces start coming back together. Nothing fits together well, and the system is suddenly five times larger and far more difficult to implement and use. The initial goal has been over-complicated. What had been a strategic vision has been lost in the concern over tactical detail.

The moral of this little story is this: Hold on to the initial goals of a project, keep that objective eye. Do not allow a focus on individual elements to override the good of the whole. Gather your user and business requirements upfront, create and document the initial project goals and strategy. Then, as the project continues, refer to these documents and test against those goals.

Don’t be like the centipede – don’t focus so closely on each separate step that you completely lose your footing.

0 Comments on this article