Sherin E.

Does the 80/20 rule apply to programming? The 80/20 rule is often interpreted as a tradeoff between the level of effort and quality of the solution. 20% of the effort gets you to 80% of the solution; the other 80% of effort goes to polish up the remaining 20% for a more perfect solution. It definitely applies to software. There are many problems which can be quickly and easily solved with an imperfect solution. The key question is often whether or not the imperfect solution is sufficient, or if you have to put in significantly more effort for a better solution. One concrete example might be adding functionality to an existing data model in a data store (blob store, SQL database, etc). The perfect solution may be to redefine the data model with the appropriate schema to solve your problem. However, this is often very difficult and time consuming, so most software organizations instead go to great length to overload their existing data models without modification until its absolutely necessary to put in that time and effort.