Simpler can be better

We over complicate.  Almost everything.  We have advanced strategies even when we haven’t been particularly good at the basics.

Take testing for example.  We’re trying to move from being black box testers to doing risk based testing.  We’re not good at the basics of black box testing.  Far too much gets by us when we attempt to cover all the functionality.  What is going to happen when we deliberately skip some testing because we don’t think it is “risky”?  We haven’t got a clue what risky means; we don’t even know what parts of the system are error prone.

But I didn’t learn an important lesson about simpler being better from work today.  After all, it’s Sunday and I’m not at work.  But more importantly, I learned simpler is better from playing a video game.

Our friends have a Nintendo Wii.  We also have one, though we don’t own many games for it.  Our daughter never plays the Wii at home.  And furthermore, she’s just under 3 years old.  Her skill with a Wii controller is, from what we can tell, fairly limited.  But when she sees it being played at our friends’ house, she really wants to try it.

And she asks very politely to play.  In this case our friends’ son was playing Wii Playground.  It’s a series of mini-games like dodgeball, tetherball, paper airplanes, and slot cars.  My daughter has no capabilities to do anything advanced with a Wii Remote.  She can wave it about and press a button and hold it.  She has no idea about pressing a button several times, or pressing the B button.  All she can do is press the A button, and wave it about.

So our friends’ son set our daughter up with slot cars.  There are all kinds of cool things you can do with slot cars.  You can press “A” twice to make the car turbo boost, you can move the remote left and right to switch lanes, you can press “B” to activate special powers.  And doing all this, you can hop between lanes, catching speed boosts on the track and blasting in front of your opponents.

Now my little one doesn’t know about winning or losing, she just likes to try.  I’m happy for her to do that.  After all, she’s not even 3.  Anyway, once she had the remote in hand, the race started and she held down the “A” button to make the car go.

Sure enough, the car took off down the track.  Our little one didn’t move the car between lanes, she didn’t use the turbo boost, she didn’t activate any special powers.  She didn’t ram her opponents off the track.  Despite all the capabilities that this game had, she used none of them.  She just put the pedal to the metal (so to speak) by holding onto the “A” button.

She won!  She won 3 races in a row… against computer opponents, who have no idea that it’s a 2 year old playing against them!  Computer opponents don’t take it easy on you.  I’ve played the slot cars game – I have LOST at the game.  I tried the advanced strategies.  I tried to jockey for the best slot to be in, use the speed boosts, knock my opponents off the track.

Simpler was better.  My daughter, doing nothing but holding “A” beat the computer consistently.  We tend to over think, to try and use advanced techniques to get a huge edge.  We don’t need those things!  Sure, my daughter didn’t beat the opponents by a hundred car lengths, or even ten.  She just beat them.

Think simple.  Try basic.  Try boring.  Try consistent, but unexciting.  The results might surprise you.  They sure surprised the heck out of me.