You should have played SimCity..
Raise your hand if you, as a developer, have never been asked to realize someone’s “big idea”. I think we all have been there at least once. Maybe it comes from one of your friend or maybe you have to tackle this in your daily job. Usually it comes similar to: “it should be like Facebook, but with Twitter and Instagram and many other features, of course!”.
Usually all of this requests have one thing in common. They want to start big.
And every time I hear it an analogy comes to my mind. I used to play lots of sim games when I was a child, and, I must admit, we are missing that kind of games now! It was not a matter of merely tapping impulsively a screen to gain rewards or coins to proceed the game, but it was a matter of planning and strategy.
One of my favorite games was SimCity, the city building simulation game. Now, suppose we play a game cheating and starting with all the money we want. We pause the game and start planning in anticipation all of our city needs. We build highways and railways in a nice fashion, residential, commercial and industrial zones all well distributed, gardens to battle the pollution, police and fire stations next to high risks areas and so on, until we have covered all the available space. All seems perfect in our mind.
Until we hit play.
Then it is high probable that things will not go like we had meant. Maybe people will buy houses in distant locations from industrial zones, so jobs will be missing, then criminality will start to arise and police departments will be far from the places where the gangsters will strive, and so on. Maintenance costs will be too high because we won’t receive the taxes we assumed. Then we have to cheat again and get more money. And so forth we have to break things, destroy buildings, move things around until all becomes an unmanageable mess and people begin to leave our town. Our ghost town. I guess you’ve taken the point.
On the counterpart, let’s begin a new game with the given budget. This time we will start small. We place some residential zones next to industrial ones, we supply the power lines, build the minimum necessary amount of roads. Then we begin to earn a little and we have the possibility of improve our city. But we have got one thing more that is important. We have knowledge. We have a better understanding of our little village needs, maybe people themselves will start to ask for new things to build. We can see the areas that are prone to fires and build a fire department in that area, build bigger roads in place of congested lanes, position schools proximate to populous zones etc. Our city will grow better and in a more sustainable way.
Oh wait! We were just practicing agile playing SimCity! Amazing! That’s why I’m saying you should have played SimCity when it comes to build a system. Starting small can be the key, because you have the possibility of crafting a local community. And with local I don’t mean geographical proximity, but a community that embrace the same needs your software is going to target. On most occasions it’s not the idea itself that leads a project to flourish, but it’s the path and its realization that can really make the difference.
