Sometimes when people are building software, either just for them selves or for others to use as well, they end up adding a lot of extravagant features: Generalizing, prettifying, refactoring. Expanding the scope of the computational pipeline. Most often at a huge cost of man-power. I have been down that road several times.

Obviously, what we must ask is the important question: “Does the feature we are about to implement really matter?”.  Small businesses like biogeeks (which is even smaller than small at the moment) as well as small bioinformatics group need to emphasize that “less is more”.  Find out what the essentials are and then focus.

37signals.com has published an excellent book about their view on clean, minimal software development. Much of the thinking in that book can be summarized by this quote:

“Would these things be nice to have? Sure. But are they essential? Do they really matter? Nope. And that’s why we left them out. The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made.

Most of the time you spend is wasted on things that just don’t matter. If you can cut out the work and thinking that just don’t matter, you’ll achieve productivity you’ve never imagined.”