Bulldozer00's Blog

In the software world, YAGNI is one of many cutely named heuristics from the agile community that stands for “don’t waste time/money putting that feature/functionality in the code base NOW cuz odds are that You Ain’t Gonna Need It!”. It’s good advice, but it’s often violated innocently, or when the programmer doesn’t agree with the YAGNI admonisher for legitimate or “political” reasons.

When a team finds out downstream and (more importantly) admits that there’s lots of stuff in the code base that can be removed because of YAGNI violations, there are two options to choose from:

• Spend the time/money and incur the risk of breakage by extricating and removing the YAGNI features
• Leave the unused code in there to save time/money and eschew making the code base slimmer and, thus, easier to maintain.

It’s not often perfectly clear what option should be taken, but BD00 speculates (he always speculates) that the second option is selected way more often than the first. What’s your opinion?