Make it easy or make it simple

If you make things easy for yourself you'll probably not figure out the most simple solution... The product owner wanted a combo (Product) on a form. That shouldn't be too hard.

Well, actually this meant two forms - one in the PC application and one in the windows mobile application. And depending on what you choose in another combo (Product Type) different fields should be visible and there should be different options in the wanted combo, Product. And if one of the options in the Product Type combo is selected, this affects a sub domain (Warehouse) and if another choice is made another sub domain is affected (Time management). And we haven't done any modeling of these sub domains. And the next sprint starts on Monday.

If we'd done things easy for ourselves we'd just ignored that we touched the sub domain and made a guess. But that would have meant that we'd built in complexity. And we wouldn't know if that would have been the right complexity or if would have built it too complex. Easy now, horrible later, in other words.

The simple choice is to remove the combo that created all the complexity, Product type. Instead one form on each platform will be built and we'll include the product type later. When you look at it here afterwards it's not so difficult of a choice, but the simple choice is often the most difficult of decisions.