#KISS MEANING KEEP IT SIMPLE SOFTWARE#
#KISS MEANING KEEP IT SIMPLE PROFESSIONAL#

It reduces complexity and improves readability as well as maintainability by aiming for the simplest solution.

#KISS MEANING KEEP IT SIMPLE SOFTWARE#

here) is an important principle in software development, even though it apparently originated in engineering. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS) is a design principle which states that designs and/or systems should be as simple as possible.

#KISS MEANING KEEP IT SIMPLE PROFESSIONAL#

Communication strategists advise it to ensure presentations and talking points don’t distract from key messages. KISS - an acronym for keep it simple stupid is a design rule that every professional developer should apply to their code. KISS ('keep it simple, stupid' or 'keep it simple stupid', see e.g. Advertisers use it to make sure pitches are clear and direct. Web designers remember it to keep their sites navigable and fast-loading. Johnson died in 1990, but “Keep it simple, stupid” lives on as a valuable motto for all sorts of professionals. By eliminating unnecessary complexity, Skunk Works developed some of aviation’s most significant breakthroughs in record time. It was a way to remind his team that their state-of-the-art jets still had to be repaired by average mechanics with basic tools.īut simpler didn’t mean dumbed down. Johnson came up with KISS during World War II. (They worked near an awful-smelling plastics factory.) Clarence “Kelly” Johnson via Interesting Engineering He headed their secret division named Skunk Works, a now-common name for R&D departments that was initially an inside joke. Johnson was a renowned aeronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin for more than 40 years. That was the genius of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the guy who simultaneously led one of the most innovative teams in history, and coined the KISS Principle, i.e. Simplification is tough, whether you’re refining writing, describing services or designing a website. Moreover, he mentions that these mental models are made up of 6 to 12 components, and that a diagram made up of 13 or more visual components is probably not likely to be fully integrated into people’s mental models of the world.< 1 Min Read The Business Story Behind the KISS Principle None of these variables seemed to affect the complexity of the diagrams they used to represent the systems.ĭave Gray also mentions that when the researchers instructed the participants to take their time and add as much detail to their diagrams as possible, that even in these circumstances the participants maxed-out at 13 visual elements.ĭave Gray concludes, that we all tend to construct mental models of the world that consistently influence our understanding of how things work. This study is significant because it proved that it did not matter whether people created diagrams using pencils and markers or plasticine and cut-outs, or whether they were diagramming a complex system or a simple object.

In fact, Dave Gray mentions that this was true no matter what kinds of creation-tools they used and regardless of the complexity of the system they were diagramming. The researchers discovered that when people create visual diagrams that they use about 6 to 12 visual elements - otherwise known as nodes - to describe a system. A while back I stumbled across an article written by Dave Gray who mentioned a 1997 study that researched the process people undertake while creating a visual diagram.

Kiss meaning keep it simple