YAGNI – You Aren’t Going To Need It

The easiest way to save money and time building software products is to only build things that are absolutely essential. More features and frameworks means more code to write, more code to test and more code to go wrong. The cost of ownership of larger code bases is generally higher because they are more complex and there are opportunity costs for every feature implemented.

The Agile Manifesto has twelve principles and arguably the single most transformational thing it states about building software is:

Simplicity–the art of maximising the amount of work not done–is essential.

Ian Thomas made an excellent presentation at Agile Yorkshire about the cost of gold plating solutions and living by the YAGNI principle.