How do you KISS ?

Posted by Conor on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Conor
Published on 2011-01-13T12:45:50Z Indexed on 2011/01/13 12:58 UTC
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Productivity

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best-practices

The KISS principal is a highly quoted design mantra. The aim of this principle is to stamp out unnecessary complexity on a project. This is a good thing, saving time, energy and money. It can lead to a relatively stress free implementation and a simple, elegant, maintainable end product.

A lot of discussion on KISS provides mechanisms to simplify requirements, design and implementation. Things that spring to mind include: avoid scope creep; simple obvious design and code; minimal run-time dependencies; refactoring to maintain simplicity; etc.

However there are a lot of implicit things that we do to KISS. Examples: small team sizes; minimal management layers; tidy desk; mastery of a single IDE; clear concise error messages; scripts to automate/encapsulate tasks; etc

The purpose of this question is to derive a checklist of KISS items. I'm especially interested in non-obvious items.

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