Attack the plan

Think of it when you are about to start work that will take more than a day, and the plan lives only in your head.

In everyday life

Like a builder who walks you through the floor plan before the concrete is poured: where does this door open, where do the pipes go? Each answer costs a minute on paper and a wall later.

One case

A team builds table booking for a restaurant site. In week 2, a tester books for a group of 9, and the largest table seats 8. Nobody had decided what should happen, and the answer forces a rewrite of 3 of the 5 screens.

Attack the plan
The ideaBefore you build
Attack the plan

Let someone question your plan hard before you build it, one decision at a time, until nothing is left assumed.

Before you build, Habits

Every case

Every plan rests on decisions, and many of them were made without anyone noticing. Each hidden decision is a question the code will ask later, when the answer costs a rewrite. The same question costs a minute before the first line of code. A good grilling works through the plan like a tree: settle one decision, then ask the questions that depend on it, until no branch is left. The edge caseAn unusual input at the limit of what the code expects, such as an empty cart or a group larger than any table. questions are the ones people skip most.

The word

Engineers call this

grillingLet someone question your plan hard before you build it, one decision at a time, until nothing is left assumed.

Before you build, have the plan questioned until no decision is left unspoken. Answer in words what would cost a rewrite in code.

Where this idea leads

Skills that encode it

  • grilling Matt PocockWorks the plan as a design tree, one round of questions at a time, until no branch is left silently assumed.
  • grill-with-docs Matt PocockRuns the same interview and writes the glossary and decision records as each answer settles.