[hinkley]

The thing about the Mikado method is that you’re taking what from your perspective is a top down task and flipping it to bottom up. Which is for instance more amenable to refactoring, which is a bottom up task.

Sometimes when you get to the bottom you discover a shorter route backup to the top. The trap is that since you “already wrote the code” is seems a shame to delete it. But that code hasn’t been reviewed or vetted and “code is not the bottleneck”. You really do want to delete it because there’s a new version that’s 1/3 the code, and touches less of the existing system, and so will take less work to review and vet.

[narag]

Thank you, I had not hear of that method (my comment was more about wetware) but I doubt it will be unfamiliar to me, I've done everything refactor related, mostly successfully... when they let me (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47163985 )