Quotes About Flexibility

A good manager drives a project to be good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and done as much as necessary. A good manager manages the coefficients on these attributes rather than demanding that all those coefficients are 100%. It is this kind of management that Agile strives to enable.

Good software designs accommodate change without huge investments and rework. When we use code that is out of our control, special care must be taken to protect our investment and make sure future change is not too costly.

The way you keep software soft is to leave as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. What are the options that we need to leave open? They are the details that don't matter.

If you can develop the high-level policy without committing to the details that surround it, you can delay and defer decisions about those details for a long time. And the longer you wait to make those decisions, the more information you have with which to make them properly.

Indeed, most of us realize that the requirements are the most volatile elements in the project.

Regardless of how they are eventually deployed, well-designed components always retain the ability to be independently deployable and, therefore, independently developable.

THE COMMON REUSE PRINCIPLE Don't force users of a component to depend on things they don't need.

A good architecture makes it unnecessary to decide on Rails, or Spring, or Hibernate, or Tomcat, or MySQL, until much later in the project. A good architecture makes it easy to change your mind about those decisions, too. A good architecture emphasizes the use cases and decouples them from peripheral concerns

LEAVING OPTIONS OPEN

When the stakeholders change their minds about a feature, that change should be simple and easy to make. The difficulty in making such a change should be proportional only to the scope of the change, and not to the shape of the change.

A good architecture protects the majority of the source code from those changes. It leaves the decoupling mode open as an option so that large deployments can use one mode, whereas small deployments can use another.

highway through the middle of a small town that anticipates growth? Who would want such a road through their town? It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow.

Don't depend on volatile things. GUIs are volatile.

When software is done right, it requires a fraction of the human resources to create and maintain. Changes are simple and rapid. Defects are few and far between. Effort is minimized, and functionality and flexibility are maximized.

Some folks think that Agile is about going fast. It's not. It's never been about going fast. Agile is about knowing, as early as possible, just how screwed we are.

performance-appraisal sheet would have looked like this: Adaptability 0 Adventuresomeness 100 Cruelty 100 Energy 100 Flexibility 0 Intelligence 100 Justice 100 Gets along well with others 0

You want to retain the elasticity of spirit you had as a child, interested in everything, while retaining the hard-nosed need to verify and scrutinize for yourself all ideas and beliefs.

Since you are on your own, it is up to you to foresee the changes going on right now in your profession. You must adapt your Life's Task to these circumstances. You do not hold on to past ways of doing things, because that will ensure you will fall behind and suffer for it. You are flexible and always looking to adapt. If change is forced upon you, you must resist the temptation to overreact or feel sorry for yourself.

What you want in warfare is room to maneuver. Tight corners spell death. Having enemies gives you options. You can play them off against each other, make one a friend as a way of attacking the other, on and on.

The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.

The environment we operate in may be different, but the brain is essentially the same, and its power to learn, adapt, and master time is universal.

Preserve the unspoken option of being able to leave at any moment and reclaim your freedom if the side you are allied with starts to collapse.

The Dimensional Mind has two essential requirements: one, a high level of knowledge about a field or subject; and two, the openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways.

Daily Law: When it comes to the ideas and opinions you hold, see them as toys or building blocks that you are playing with. Some you will keep, others you will knock down, but your spirit remains flexible and playful. The Laws of Human Nature, 7: Soften People's Resistance by Confirming Their Self-Opinion—The Law of Defensiveness