Below is an excerpt from Jeff Atwood's Effective Programming: More than Writing Code. This book is basically a collection of his blog posts on Coding Horror. If you are lazy like me this book is a one-stop shop for the best programming advice culled from his blog. In short, gold mine for all programmers.
In this excerpt, he drills the value of iterating faster and speed of execution (this is a universal law, in nearly every field - software development or otherwise):
Boyd's Law of Iteration: Speed of iteration beats the quality of iteration
Boyd decided that the primary determinant to winning dogfights was not observing, orienting, planning or acting better. The primary determinant to winning dogfights was observing, orienting, planning and acting faster. In other words, how quickly one could iterate.
Speed of iteration, Boyd suggested, beats the quality of iteration.
Speed of iteration - the Google Chrome project has it.
1.0 Dec 11,2008
2.0 May 24, 2009
3.0 Oct 12, 2009
4.0 Jan 25, 2010
5.0 May 25, 2010
6.0, Sep 2, 2010
Chrome was a completely respectable browser in V1 and V2. The entire project has moved forward so fast that it now is, at least in my humble opinion, the best browser on the planet. Google went from nothing, no web browser at all, to best of breed in under two years. Meanwhile Internet Explorer took longer than the entire development period of Chrome to go from version 7 to version 8. And by the time IE 9 ships, it will be completely outclassed by both Firefox and Chrome.
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So until further notice, we will be following the same strategy as the Android and Chrome teams: We are going to go that way, really fast. And if something gets in our way, we will turn.
Larry Page responds on high correlation between speed and good decisions:
"There are good fast decisions but no good slow decisions"
Cheers to that!
