How could a big glob of complicated Greasemonkey script be considered beautiful?  What if it saved a company millions of dollars, let them rocket past their competitors and only cost $40 dollars to produce?  

Our notion of beautiful code is incomplete when it ignores the business context of code.  An elegant software solution to a problem must handle many competing forces, only one of which is technical beauty.  

Genuine professionals must work in sync with business, not foolishly produce poorly-designed working code or blindly following rigid rules about “clean code”.  A Sufficient Design is one that fits the business context perfectly.  It may be technically elegant, good, mediocre or even poor. The art is to set quality levels to be in sync with the business context and to adjust that quality level in response to business context changes.

In this talk I’ll share real-world stories and lessons learned about Sufficient Design.