The Pursuit of Perfection
The pursuit of perfection is fine in the abstract, but let me describe one significant problem that should not be over-looked.
Recalling the Pareto rule (80% of the value of anything is provided by 20% of the constituent items), let’s consider a system with 100 items outstanding. Then we have 80 items peripheral and 20 items crucial to the core functionality.
Perfection implies that all items must be completed. You have probably seen as often as I have how this results in a typical working assumption that all items are equal.
Too often the human tendency is to work on the easiest problems first. Therefore, the 20 crucial and (usually) difficult issues are approached with many degrees of freedom removed (by the solution to the 80 easy and peripheral items). The crucial items are left with cramped, constrained solution paths.
I have seen convoluted solutions that undoubtedly have this
etiology. Thus we are left with feeble (non-robust) solutions to the more crucial items.
My working procedure to avoid this limitation of perfection is to enforce the maxim - no decision before its time.
Anti-Corollary
to
The Pursuit of Perfection
If you have a very difficult problem to solve and there are many features that are not related to the solution, it is often better to dispose of the non-essential features so that you can focus on the core problem.
The important consideration is that when you solve side
problems (features) that you do not remove degrees of freedom in the handling
of the core problem.
