Which Way to Slice?

I’ve often pondered the different ways chicken is prepared in European recipes versus Chinese ones. European cooks tend to separate the chicken at the joints. This gives us well-defined, identifiable and named pieces of chicken: this is the thigh and this is the leg. In Chinese cuisine, the cooks tend to chop the chicken in the middle of the long bones rather than between them. I used to think this was “wrong,” but I now see some advantages to doing it that way. This opens access to the marrow and takes away the temptation to remove connective tissue in the joints. These are two things that can add flavor to stewed chicken. And with a sturdy, sharp knife, chopping the chicken at arbitrary points can be done very rapidly. I’ve come to the conclusion that both approaches have value and both have advantages and disadvantages. You can choose which way you want to work based on habit or based on how those advantages and disadvantages work for your needs.

The same situation applies to software development. There are ways to divide the work that gives you recognizable pieces that are easy to name. And there are ways that provide a bit more value.

There's More Than One Way to Cut a Chicken

Blaise walked into the project manager’s office. "You asked me to look at the code and documentation of the old call center. I’ve gotten through it at a high level."

Marion replied, "Great, what have you found?"

"There are a couple of major components: an automated call distributor or ACD to forward calls to an appropriate customer service representative, and an Interactive Voice Response system or IVR to let the computer chat with the caller before transferring them to a human. Then there are a handful of interface components to connect to the phone company, the company’s PBX internal phone system, the CRM customer relationship database, and the CSR’s screen. These can logically be clumped into two efforts, one for the phone systems and one that’s customer centric. That and the two major components give us four components to specify and estimate."

"Blaise, those components make sense, but I don’t want to implement component by component," Marion replied, "nor estimate by component. I’ve found it too risky. Let’s talk with Ryan and the customer service representatives to find out how they actually use the current system. I’m sure we’ll need a part of each component for their first Use Case."

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Which Way to Slice?

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Which Way to Slice?