How to stop gold-plating and just be content to release working developments

Posted by Andy Bowskill on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Andy Bowskill
Published on 2012-10-06T15:17:24Z Indexed on 2012/10/06 15:51 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 259

Filed under:

agile

|

programming-practices

|

Productivity

The development team that I'm a member of has recently adapted to work according to Agile practices. This has personally highlighted the fact that I can't stop myself gold-plating code (and documentation) and I consequently exceed original estimates, when I could've delivered solutions that meet the requirements much earlier.

I think my ethic is bordering on the obsessive in that I become too attached to my code and am rarely content to release before I've refactored and perfected it to the nth degree. I am happy that I have realised this but how can I change my attitude/mentality to be content with my progress and release on-time instead?

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about agile

Is Agile the new micromanagement?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
Hi, This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a… >>> More
Is Agile the new micromanagement?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial… >>> More
Security Talk Webcast: Agile Security - Develop Code Rapidly and Securely with SDL-Agile

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
Find out how SDL and Agile can be made to work well together - and in many ways actually work better together than separately. Get an in-depth look at the new MSF-Agile+SDL process template for Visual Studio Team System that can help development teams integrate SDL-Agile tasks directly into their… >>> More
Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all. It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005. I found a book on the Rational… >>> More
Agile isn’t always Agile

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
I want to make a disclaimer before I dive into this topic – At Microsoft we use all kinds of development methodologies, and I’ve worked in lots of other shops using lots of methodologies. This is one of those “religious” topics like which programming language or database is best, and is bound to generate… >>> More

Related posts about programming-practices

programming practices starting

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I have taken my major as computer science and Engineering and I am really confused at this moment. My first course was about learning C and C++ and I learned the basics of those. Now I am really confused what to do next. Some says I should practice algorithms and do contests in ACM-ICPC for now… >>> More
Are `break` and `continue` bad programming practices?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
My boss keeps mentioning nonchalantly that bad programmers use break and continue in loops. I use them all the time because they make sense; let me show you the inspiration: function verify(object) { if (object->value < 0) return false; if (object->value > object->max_value)… >>> More
Why is C++ backward compatibility important / necessary?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
As far as understand it is a well-established opinion within the C++ community that C is an obsolete language that was useful 20 years ago but cannot support many modern good programming practices, or even encourages bad practices; certain features that were typical of C++ (C with classes) during… >>> More
Any task-control algorithms programming practices?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I was just wondering if there's any field which concerns the task-control programming (or at least that's the way I call it). For a better explanation of task-control consider the following scenario: An application (master-thread) waits for a command - which might be a particular action or… >>> More
displaying python's autodoc to the user (python 3.3)

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I'm writing a simple command line math game, and I'm using python's autodoc for my math algorithms to help me remember, for example, what a proth number is while i'm writing the algorithm, but later on I'll want to tell that information to the user as well, so they'll know what the answer was. So… >>> More