When thinking about a project, you must pick between minimizing cost and minimizing time. To think that you will do both is foolish. Pushing your team to do both just creates stress 1.
Pick two
A common refrain is: faster, cheaper, better pick two. Kent Beck adds to this to include “more”, or an expansion in scope2. He anchors on quality being a constant so you get:
- Better/Sooner/Cheaper - Spiking to get better feedback (Exploring)
- Better/Sooner/More - Deliver features quickly without constraining cost (Expand)
- Better/Cheaper/More - economically deliver features for the long run (Extract)
References
1.
DeMarco, T. Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. (Currency, 2002).
2.
Beck, K. Better/Sooner/Cheaper/More. at https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/bettersoonercheapermore (2022).