Friday, February 09, 2007

Coding Horror: Boyd's Law of Iteration

My English is not good and I'm not enough self-confident to comment on that article. So I show my thought here.

"Boyd's Law of Iteration: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration."
There's something wrong with the above idea. As I learned from the course "Creativity Methodology" (or Phương pháp luận sáng tạo or TRIZ) the method "trial and error" ("phương pháp thử và sai") is not a good innovative way. The dogfighting example said the iteration with MiG15 caused pilot more fatigued than with F-86. But that cannot lead to a law because a law must be true in applying for almost cases. There is a case in real world that not suited. For gjavascript:void(0)
Publishetting a wife, you cannot iterate of going out dating with a great number of girls, except that you're a lady-killer! The Creativity Methodology said that we should focus on ideas' quality, not the number of ideas.

The reason for the iteration of software engineering is the requirement is enough precise and certain. Iteration depend on project goal adjustment, amount of certainty, priority changes... The important is what you learned from fail and success after each iteration.

PS: I always like to use the "lover dating" example 'cause it breaks the "trial and error" method which is translated in Vietnamese like "thua keo này ta bày keo khác" or "cứ thử xem, sẽ biết ngay mà" :-)

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