For years I’ve had a gut instinct about the “slow down to speed up” idea of software development, but I’ve never untangled that paradox properly. It hit me this morning, after doing a team Escape Room yesterday.

With Escape Rooms, the way we solve the puzzles has no effect on the future puzzles. But in software, the solutions we write today ARE tomorrow’s puzzles. There’s a feedback loop there. And if we move fast and are a bit sloppy today, then tomorrow’s puzzles will be more difficult

And so it will take longer to solve tomorrow’s puzzles, as the difficulty level has been raised. But if instead we go slowly and carefully today, then tomorrow’s puzzles will be easier, so we will solve them faster.

And that’s why the XP practices: pairing, mobbing, TDD, continuous refactoring etc might look like they slow you down. They probably DO. But that creates better software, with simpler puzzles for tomorrow.