- focus on very specific examples. "We did this (here's the code from the git repo N years ago) and that's how it went wrong".
- if examples don't present themselves, sometimes it's worth letting people do "over complexity mistakes" and let themselves get burned, if you can afford it.
- in such cases lay out simple criteria for success and failure, like "it's going to take too long" or "it's going to be too complex to modify". Write them down, in private, then pull out when it blows up (not necessarily to be an A-hole, just being able to quote the discussion gives you much more credibility in a post mortem).
- Sometimes a bit of "it's too clever for me" works, depending on how humble you're feeling...
But ultimately KISS works because it works, which is hard to see without reference to practical code.
- focus on very specific examples. "We did this (here's the code from the git repo N years ago) and that's how it went wrong".
- if examples don't present themselves, sometimes it's worth letting people do "over complexity mistakes" and let themselves get burned, if you can afford it.
- in such cases lay out simple criteria for success and failure, like "it's going to take too long" or "it's going to be too complex to modify". Write them down, in private, then pull out when it blows up (not necessarily to be an A-hole, just being able to quote the discussion gives you much more credibility in a post mortem).
- Sometimes a bit of "it's too clever for me" works, depending on how humble you're feeling...
But ultimately KISS works because it works, which is hard to see without reference to practical code.