[gearoidoc]

A good response :)

I think we just lie on different sides of the fence on whether to apply best practice early and suffer the initial time cost upfront versus getting a rough around the edges product in place and refactoring later.

Do you have links to articles about companies whose business failed due to lack of technical agility? I was thinking about this recently and don't believe I've ever read about such a case, but its highly likely I'm looking in the wrong places :)

[freshhawk]

I look at it as a spectrum rather than a binary choice. I find, for myself, that in the last few years I've gotten screwed too often by spending weeks (amortized over a few months to a year) fixing bugs and patching up hacks that I could have avoided with a few hours of upfront cost.

So I try to move my default a little more to the best practice side. I also don't see this epidemic of overdesign in our community, although it exists. I see people hit a design debt wall and have greatly reduced velocity more often. Sometimes laziness reinforces a desire to move quickly and the wrong tradeoffs are chosen. Sometimes the upfront cost is higher because you have to train people in those best practices, or at least teach them the new tools.

I also have noticed that different fields of programming have different sweet spots so it's not surprising that people don't agree on the one true way either.