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Plan to throw one away

One of the chapters in the famous book "The mythical man month" by Fred Brooks is titled "Plan to throw one away". The idea is that you should plan to throw the first version of your software away, and then re-write it the way it should be. It is very likely that you will end up with a better written product and the total time spent will be less than it would have been trying to fix all mistakes you made in the first version.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but throwing the first version of the product might save you both time and money.

It should be noted that the first edition of the book was published in 1975, long before agile software development techniques and things like Scrum became the reality of every software developer. However, with Scrum we've seen to forgotten this completely. We do not plan to test things out for one sprint, then throw it away and do it correctly the next. No, we want to deliver costumer value every single sprint, all the time. The effect being that we are effectively killing innovation and forcing the developers to continue building new features on bad solutions.

The developers needs to be allowed to have sprints, a lot of sprints, where the resulting code is thrown away. The goal of such a Sprint should not be to produce costumer value, but to let the developers learn and try things out. So the sprint after that, they can produce real costumer value and keep the code base in a shape that allows them to continue doing that over and over and over.

Remember, the first version of everything will probably stink. Don't be afraid to throw it away and do it the right way.

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