Tall and Thin or Wide and Short Software?

I want to ask a controversial and debatable question. When we are starting a new project, what to build? a Tall and Thin solution or Wide and Short solution? The question might not be right totally, but you will get my point.

Toward Growthful Solutions

In terms of business, T/T will meet the business in a short time while W/S might needs more capacity to achieve the business.

In terms of growth, T/T will be blocked shortly while W/S can afford more business on top of it’s base for the current scope. It is growthful for the future needs.

Technically, growthful solutions will consider design/quality attributes like maintainability, testability, reuseability, extensionability, readability, modularity, …

Technically, W/S means that you are building solutions that is configurable and extensionable at run-time based on meta-data or by configurations.

An extreme approach of T/T produces ugly and limping solutions that needs a lot of rework. Copy-Paste and hard-coding are it’s forms.

W/S — that has a pyramidal shape — is followed in case of developing products and doing R&D activities. It is a fertile soil for an innovative ideas like developing frameworks and automated processes.

Agile wise

The slope of the burn down chart might behave like this in my beliefs and experience !

Following that will led us to solutions that will be survived for a long time. As you see, you are building a momentum at the beginning and then features can be shipped without much effort .

I heard that question “Tall and Thin or Wide and Short?” for the first time in my 2nd college year and stuck in my mind. It wasn’t understood then but now it isn’t.

This is just a point of view, let’s open this discussion. I’ve been relaxed that I could eventually dump that in an article.

#agile #productization #growth