[jwhiles]

“ The process is self-reinforcing; the more degraded it becomes, the harder it is to develop a useful and accurate theory.” This is a really good point I think.

It feels like the Sprint / Agile practices that a lot of us use lead us to value expediency more than anything. So we'll try and find the quickest way to make a change that gets an existing program to do what we want. If we lack a working theory of the codebase that usually means we're doing something that runs counter to the overall design. And then over time everything gets worse and harder.