Lately I've been thinking about the airplane design analogy for writing software. Supposedly (possibly apocryphally) Bill Gates said that measuring software development progress by lines of code written was like measuring aircraft design progress by weight.
I think the analogy is a valuable one.
On an airplane, you might look for places where the airframe is stronger than it needs to be. If you can save material there, it'll be not just cheaper but lighter and more efficient. If the weight savings improves the flight characteristics of the aircraft, or if allows for the addition of safety features elsewhere, it might improve safety as well.
This is a really hard conversation to have in software, because when people think they can make something better with a lot of extra code, a lot of times they'll just do it, even if they know that other people think it's unnecessary. They put in the extra time on their own responsibility, thinking that the only downside is the initial work to write the code, and once it's done, it becomes an asset. It sucks to tell them that I'd rather not have it, that I'd rather have the easy version they could have done in an hour. I give in way more often than I'd like to.
I think the analogy is a valuable one.
On an airplane, you might look for places where the airframe is stronger than it needs to be. If you can save material there, it'll be not just cheaper but lighter and more efficient. If the weight savings improves the flight characteristics of the aircraft, or if allows for the addition of safety features elsewhere, it might improve safety as well.
This is a really hard conversation to have in software, because when people think they can make something better with a lot of extra code, a lot of times they'll just do it, even if they know that other people think it's unnecessary. They put in the extra time on their own responsibility, thinking that the only downside is the initial work to write the code, and once it's done, it becomes an asset. It sucks to tell them that I'd rather not have it, that I'd rather have the easy version they could have done in an hour. I give in way more often than I'd like to.