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Richard Wynn
Richard Wynn

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YAGNI Principle in 100 seconds

💡 What does YAGNI stand for?

YAGNI stands for You Ain’t Gonna Need It. It’s a principle from software development methodology of Extreme Programming (XP). This principle says that you should not create features that it's not really necessary.
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This principle is similar to the KISS principle, once that both of them aim for a simpler solution. The difference between them is that YAGNI focus on removing unnecessary functionality and logic, and KISS focus on the complexity.

Why YAGNI?

  • Any work that's only used for a feature that's needed tomorrow, means losing effort from features that need to be done for the current iteration.
  • Creeping featurism leads to code bloat; the software will becomes larger and much more complicated.

Quotes

  • Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them. (Ron Jeffries, one of the co-founders of the XP)

📝 When not to practice YAGNI

  • Learning something new: Evaluate a new technology exclusively to gain the time back later and minimize the risk of losing more time by making the wrong decision.
  • Current design decisions based on future needs: Don't sabotage your efforts because you think they violate YANGI. Instead, make the future-proof design decision, but only implement enough to fulfill the current need.
  • Abstracting external dependencies: Take time to astract these dependencies will avoid rework and decrease the complexity.
  • Testing, Security, Scale, and Business Requirements: YAGNI is not a free-pass on writing tests, secure code, considering scale, or business requirements. Alt Text

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📰 Other Programming Principles

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Top comments (1)

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Mahdi Khashan

Thanks for the concise article!