there is a pretty vast middle ground between 'talking every day for a year, and never making any plans' and 'make a plan for a year, don't meet in the interim a

there is a pretty vast middle ground between 'talking every day for a year, and never making any plans' and 'make a plan for a year, don't meet in the interim and try to integrate then' make plans. try to gauge costs. change plans when necessary. integrate as soon as is reasonable. use consensus to drive structure/interfaces. maintain a testable artifact. maybe running a service is different, but variants on the above seem to be the only thing that works for software.