Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
- Seth Godin

One well known issue in software development productivity is the problem of gold plating. Gold plating occurs when someone wants their product to be as good as possible and this sense of product quality takes precedence over development speed. It’s not just software development, the desire to gold plate can occur almost anywhere: writing, painting a room in your house, cleaning your car, doing whatever you do at work.

I have a confession: I’m a gold plater. The lesson I have trouble learning is that valuable is not equal to perfect. Most of the value in anything probably comes from a critical 20% of the thought, effort, and/or time spent. The quote at the beginning of this post is actually from Seth Godin’s Write Like A Blogger post where he says:

Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
- Seth Godin

That’s the thing about gold plating, it keeps you from showing up more often in all kinds of things you want to do. Like me, you may have a tremendous desire to gold plate everything! David Allen in Getting Things Done rightfully advises that we break everything down into actionable tasks. This is wise because we cannot do “Annual Report”, but we can do, “call manager X”, “write outline”, “research financial figures”, etc. The problem for me is that once I have determined these actionable tasks, I want results to be perfect. This either makes them take too long to perform, or makes me not want to start them knowing the effort level will be high. I am not showing up.

In software development, gold plating is often a consequence of minimal specifications, when too much leeway is given to the developer to specify the details of the product. Therefore, perhaps one way to avoid perfectionism is to have an extremely detailed understanding of what the result of a task needs to look like before you start, and to contract with yourself to stop the minute you get there.

I think this is one reason I like twitter. The result of the actionable task of composing a message, has to be under 140 characters. The risk of gold plating a message (which usually means getting extremely verbose) is mitigated nicely by this enforced hard stop. Every task should have it’s own 140 character limit.

Resources

Gold plating, and other issues in software development are discussed in Steve McConnell’s excellent book Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. I know that some aspects of software development have evolved since this book was first written, but I am sure many of the lessons remain pertinent.

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