[quickthrower2]

All depends on what the I is in the YAGNI. I have seen development be parallised where the same work is being done again and again by different developers in different ways because YAGN { maybe 2-3 days of upfront architecture and design for a 6 month project }. This results in bugs and maintenance nightmares. This was before unit tests were common though, so maybe unit tests may have saved it. But surely it was slower to develop that way.

But tautologically you can't take YAGNI too far, if the "YAGN" part is actually true :-). But that is always under debate.

[pydry]

It certainly feels that way. 2 or 3 days of up front architecture and design with hindsight is always better than 2 or 3 days of up front design in reality, but of course you dont have that hindsight when you start.

I've had to do up front on multiple projects and it always results in overengineering - we focused on things that didnt matter, designed things that were inappropriate, etc.

I'd always rather take those 3 days and redistribute them as extra refactoring time.