This is the 74th in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has spoken to. Enterprise Times recently interviewed Drew Millen, Chief Technology Officer at VertiGIS. He joined VertiGIS as a software developer and has risen through the ranks during his 21 years at the firm.
Millen explained how the company has grown during that time and how it differentiates from other Geospatial technology. I asked Millen what advice he would have given to himself as a junior developer starting out on their career.
He replied, “There’s many, many things. But one that I’ve learned and had to relearn a few times is – be aware of something that I would call elegance creep. In the software industry, we’ve all heard of scope creep, a requirement grows and there’s a new scope. But there’s another phenomenon that I think of as elegance creep.
“It’s where a software developer or a development team works to perfection and tries to get a software or a component of a function so perfect, that they can’t put it down until every single line of code is exactly the way that they want it to be.
“It’s just as dangerous as scope creep in terms of cost to the organisation. We need to train ourselves and our team to learn when to stop and think about minimum viable products. And good enough, is good enough. Knowing that we can iterate and circle back and improve on work that we’ve delivered. I think that we can slow ourselves down if we aim for perfection, when what we should be aiming for is continuous improvement.”
