Ola Ellnestam

Even though this was a short book, the core concept, the Mikado Method, was not substantial enough to fill it. There was a fair amount of repetition and much of the book was filled out with semi-related supplementary picture. I suspect this is one of those instances where something is really more fit for a series of blog posts but putting it in a book gives it legitimacy.

But I still give the book three stars because the Mikado method is a small but clever tool for modifying code that you don't know intimately -- so any non-trivial code written by anyone else or by yourself more than 3 months ago =).

The core idea is that instead of endlessly analyzing the code, you just start making the simplest changes you can to try to achieve your goal. As you make changes, things will fail, and you capture what you learn in a dependency graph. Then, and this is the key part, you revert everything you've done so far and start one one of the leaves of your growing graph. Although the book has more detail than this article, the article has enough information to use the method productively.

The power of this method lies in the fact that you always have a working system. You don't get into a tangle where a change should be simple, but then there's an error. But the fix for that should be simple, so you push ahead. And again and again until you hit up against something that isn't simple and your code is a non-compiling, test failing mess.

You can take or leave the book, but I definitely would encourage reading the article and trying the method next time you are working in complex or unknown territories.… (plus d'informations)