Keep It Simple Stupid and Don’t Repeat Yourself

A Development Principal used at GDF

Did you ever hear about kiss and dry? If you are in the field of development of course otherwise probably not. Whether you already know it or not, we'll give you a deeper insight into how it works for the GDF.

The Allianz Group with its operating entities is represented in more than 70 countries worldwide, has a workforce of about 147.000 employees and serves more than 100 million customers in the private and corporate sector. A company of this dimension often encounters complex procedures and processes. 

We at the GDF always strive to the superordinate goal, to make our OE’s life easier by providing simple and intuitive digital solutions. 

Bring your code in shape

To demonstrate the relevance and importance of the kiss principle, we will look back to 20 years ago. 20 years ago, the work performance of a developer was measured by the length of his code. Sometimes developers were paid better the longer the programmed software was. This of course led to a tendency to generate longer and more difficult codes. 

Today, this view has completely changed. Of course, it is still necessary to program high quality codes, but as minimalistic and complexity-reduced as possible. 

Even someone who is not familiar with programming can see that the code on the right looks quite easier than the left one. Basically, the result of the codes is the same. The purpose is to convert an object with personal data to another type (object mapping). The left code should offer many possibilities for extension and therefore was written in a very complex way. However, these possibilities were finally not used and only made it hard to understand. To simplify the code, the mapping only appears in one part, without side effects.

Kiss and dry at GDF

What looks simple is in reality hard to achieve. To reach a very high level of simplicity in programming a lot of expertise and experience is needed. Allianz is a very large company which suddenly can imply that a lot of persons are dealing with one project. This can cause a bureaucracy and sophisticated processes. Therefore, sometimes it is not possible to realize the kiss principle 100 percent, but it is always feasible to keep it in mind. And that’s exactly what we do at the GDF. We want to make our solutions maintainable for future generations. 

Also away from programming we want to simplify procedures and digital processes, which is why we think always about kiss even outside of programming. 

  • We try to use software which has a broad approach and is easy to adapt 
  • We develop new technologies which simplify complex processes 
  • When choosing new tools, we keep kiss in mind 

Tooling with the kiss principle

Let’s have a look on our different tools: Playing Lego at work, sounds a little bit stupid, doesn’t it? But it isn’t! We used this simple approach of building blocks in the field of UI design with our modular building block system. You remember theming? Simply increase usability to better customize applications. Or think about our App center how to guide. We kept everything we do as simple and “stupid” as possible. Furthermore, we are trying to consolidate the efforts of many development teams into kind of shared assets and reusable best practices to avoid repeating yourself. 

So, what about you? Come and kiss with us 😉