In the midst of some infrastructure / application remediation work for a great client in Omaha (insurance company) the concept of YAGNI came to mind. There’s a couple of quick reads for you. 
First a sort of “anti hero” opinion piece from one of the early members of Borland (Mike Rozlog) who apparently still holds the reigns of Delphi (hadn’t heard much of that tool since 2005/06 – and it’s on my remediation list for a Win 7 compliance effort) and the second a quick example of YAGI.
So take a peek at these two articles. YAGNI really does zero in on things that are often added to project, even an Agile one, that may not be needed and end up wasting time and budget. The opinion piece from Mike tests the 3 hallowed principles of “Open, Extensible and Standards” more. One of the more poignant pieces for me is, still 20+ years after my grad work in MIS and learning of the death of COBOL in 1990, that COBOL is still around.
I’ve brought this home to my “PM” life by simplifying my project schedules. I was very passionate and proud of several hundred to over a 1,000 task MS Project or Clarity schedules a few years ago. Only to find the only audience to read or understand it was other PM’s (well really they may have pretended to read or care about them) and maybe a PMO admin. Recasting those into Outlook tasks or copying and paste them into Excel began to wear on me – so I began thinking “why not just simplify this a bit”. If I can still get the task done with 3 tasks and “to-do” lists, rather than 100 tasks, then that’s the direction I go now. 
Mike’s opinion
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/229402020#
And example of YAGNI
Related articles
- Taming the Jungle of Endevor Processor Groups – Part 7 (kevingrimes.wordpress.com)
- Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Learn New Programming Languages? (ask.slashdot.org)
- If You Don’t Like My Work, Just Fire Me (news.dice.com)
- COBOL For GCC – a GNU project – Free Software Foundation (cobolforgcc.sourceforge.net)
TAPUniversity 
Posted on November 6, 2011 by Dave Kohrell
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