Simplicity
Leave a comment2011/09/15 by Mannix
“Simplicity” – a magical word constantly repeated by my CEO still resounds in my ears. How to understand it? It’s a tendency to find simple solutions instead of complex ones, that’s my very basic definition. From a former boss of mine I heard an uncountable number of times the term “KISS”. “K.I.S.S.”, Keep It Simple, Stupid”….I guess we’ve been just implementing the “K.I.S” with just the second “S” 🙂 At least that’s my humble impression.
You know, I am a computer science professional, I like using well-known standards, certainly keeping an eye on the latest researches and discussions going on in the IT world. I was used to apply the RUP approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process) because it is generic enough and simple enough to precisely represent the analyzed piece. The RUP uses UML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) as a its notation. The UML – a symbolic, visual language created in order to express the problem and the problem’s solution from several business and system perspectives. “A picture is worth a thousand words” one says, that’s what I believe when it comes to the IT world.
My new boss says that this “UML thing” cannot be serious; those childish actors skeletons, it cannot be the professional world! He’s heard it from an anonymous person in one of the top US universities so it must be true! And by the way, these document templates, which by the way had been quite full of UMLs, we’ve been using so far were just scaring the users off. They were far too complex whereas our aim is “simplicity”!
So we simplified the templates, unfortunately over-simplified…but I reckon that now everything is fine. We are consistent at making things simple, oh yeah! But….wait a second….what kind of modeling tool we chose to sustain this great “simplification” tendency? To make a long story short, “we” selected the IBM (former Telelogic) System Architect – the simplest, most user-friendly tool of the world!
Unfortunately the System Architect is not the simplest tool you can get and it’s totally misaligned when comparing to the size and needs of my company. I would go so far as to say that the tool is just enormous and cumbersome, you can do everything in it, you can customize every single bit. But…we just need a simple, robust modeling tool with functions which the SA tool does NOT have!
Well, long live the “simplicity”, another success!
belogg by zed mannix 