4 ms·
>80% of your application could be developed in 20% of the time and budget. Does it work like this? My understanding is that the Pareto Principle is that it is
by daenz 4y ago
>80% of your application could be developed in 20% of the time and budget.
Does it work like this? My understanding is that the Pareto Principle is that it is a natural distribution that is observed not something that is declared and then implemented.
If anything, this would be "80% of the time/cost comes from 20% of the features", which means if you wanted to cut costs down to 20%, you would severely cut down on features, unless you have a foolproof way to identify in advance which features will contribute the most time/cost. But this is often like having a crystal ball.
- kayodelycaon 4y agoIn my experience, skimping on error handling around edge cases will cause 1 to 3 orders of magnitude more time on support requests. In the worst case, I've seen an entire dev team spend 20% of the team on manually editing the database to patch over incomplete code. I saw this go on for 2 years before I upgraded to a better job. Management would never spare the time to fix the underlying issues because it wasn't adding new features. At another job, I spent an extra month (33% of the dev time) finessing the error handling to new application. In the first few months, a couple of issues popped up. The next six months after needed less than a day's worth of support request. I've never had an application run so smoothly in my career.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoThe numbers vary, but getting a working minimum viable product is a tiny fraction of a business, and transmuting that into a going concern is far more work than getting it kind of working in the first place. The path is tricky and there's existential danger on both sides: a chasm of endless rewrites on one and a mire of endless technical debt on the other. Both can torpedo a project ever reaching a steady state.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoIf it is a natural distribution always present in software projects it follows that if you got rid of 20% of the project that was the most expensive in time and money to develop, the remaining 80% would now be 100% of the completed project and of that 100% of the completed project 20% of it would have taken up 80% of the time and money spent developing it. If this is the case it is not an especially interesting or powerful concept for managerial purposes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]