YAGNI.

Hello and welcome back to my blog! In this blog, I want to discuss YAGNI, which stands for "Ya ain't gonna need it" or "You aren't gonna need it." My professor for CS-343 briefly mentioned it in class one day and I wanted to go over it more in depth. In the past, I've done something in my projects where I should have followed the concept of YAGNI instead. I made several methods to change a variable before I actually made the main methods of what that variable would do. In the end, it turns out the methods I made were useless toward my goal and I lost a lot of time. I hope to start applying the concept of YAGNI to my future programming in order to not waste time.

YAGNI is a really important concept in programming. Basically it means programmers and developers should only implement classes, methods, or whatever things they need only when they need them. By doing this, you can avoid doing unnecessary work and save a lot of time. When you think ahead and try to code a class or method that you think you will need in the future, it can be hard to know what exactly you need to include in it. The programmer has to do a lot of guessing and for a lot of the times, they guess incorrectly and end up not needing the feature that they spent some time on in the end. By following the concept of YAGNI instead, you don't have to do all that guessing work and are also more focused on your current task. You should only develop things that you need once they become relevant. In a large project, YAGNI is especially beneficial for programmers and developers. Let's say a programmer wants to design a feature they know they might need but aren't sure if they need it or are unclear of how to implement it. By postponing the development of that feature, it can be more clear to the programmer/developer what they exactly need to do for that feature once it becomes relevant again. You should always ask yourself if the feature you are working on is really needed at the current moment. If it's not needed, then you can take a note of it instead and come back to it later once it becomes relevant again. That way, you keep the project more simple and you program the features better since they are relevant and you have a more clear understanding of what to implement. And the most important thing, you save a lot of time with YAGNI.

 

Source: http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html