Bumper Sticker Philosophy

YAGNI: You Ain’t Gonna Need It.

Sound bites are great – short, sweet, clear, and simple. Just like real life, right?

Seductive simple certainty is what makes slogans so problematic. Uncertainty and ambiguity occur far more frequently in the real world. Context and nuance add complexity, but not all complexity can be avoided. In fact, removing essential complexity risks misapplication of otherwise valid principles.

Under the right circumstances, YAGNI makes perfect sense. Features added on the basis of speculation (“we might want to do this someday down the road”) carry costs and risks. Flexibility typically comes at the cost of complexity, which brings with it the risk of increased defects and more difficult maintenance. Even when perfectly implemented, this complexity poses the risk of making your code harder to use by its consumers due to the proliferation of options. Where the work meets a real need, as opposed to just a potential one, the costs and benefits can be assessed in a rational manner.

Where YAGNI runs into trouble is when it’s taken purely at face value. A naive application of the principle leads to design that ignores known needs that are not part of the immediate work at hand, trusting that a coherent architecture will “emerge” from implementing the simplest thing that could possibly work and then refactoring the results. As the scale of the application increases, the ability to do this across the entire application becomes more and more unlikely. One reason for employing abstraction is the difficulty in reasoning in detail about a large number of things, which you would need to do in order to refactor across an entire codebase. Another weakness of taking this principle beyond its realm of relevance is both the cost and difficulty of attempting to inject and/or modify cross-cutting architectural concerns (e.g. security, scalability, auditability, etc.) on an ad hoc basis. Snap decisions about pervasive aspects of a system ratchets up the risk level.

One argument for YAGNI (per the Wikipedia article) is that each new feature imposes constraints on the system, a position I agree with. When starting from scratch, form can follow function. However, as a system evolves, strategy tends to follow structure. Obviously, unnecessary constraints are undesirable. That being said, constraints which provide stability and consistency serve a purpose. The key is to be able to determine which is which and commit when appropriate.

In “Simplicity in Software Design: KISS, YAGNI and Occam’s Razor”, Hayim Makabee captures an important point – simple is not the same as simplistic. Adding unnecessary complexity adds risk without any attendant benefits. One good way to avoid the unnecessary that he lists is “…as possible avoid basing our design on assumptions”. At the same time, he cautions that we should avoid focusing only on the present.

It should be obvious at this point that I dislike the term YAGNI, even as I agree with it in principle. This has everything to do with the way some misuse it. My philosophy of design can be summed up as “the most important question for an architect is ‘why?'”. Relying on slogans gets in the way of a deliberate, well-considered design.