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Yup - organizations benefit from the ability to communicate about the design before the coding begins. In my experience it’s much more difficult for a new cont

Yup - organizations benefit from the ability to communicate about the design before the coding begins. In my experience it’s much more difficult for a new contributor to an open source project to do this. And, since the cost of change [1] is so much lower at the idea and design stage, most things probably aren’t reaching PR stage that would be likely to seriously fail review (tweaks and details notwithstanding). [1]: https://www.mbejda.com/mneo/ https://www.mbejda.com/mneo/

marcosdumay 5y ago
> the cost of change is so much lower at the idea and design stage That's one of those software engineering facts that people spread as absolute truths that are far from absolute in practice. It's mostly true, but requirements gathering can be a very expensive process too, and you can lower that cost with a working example. Also, UX designing can get off-track very easily if it's done in a vacuum. Also related, for some problems, having your software tested before it's even written can bring a lot of productivity to the writing stage. (For some others, it will completely ruin everybody's productivity, so the idea that finding bugs at the "testing" stage is simply "more expensive" fails here too, you don't look at an unmitigated disaster and calls it "more expensive".) For some problems bugs in production are just consequence-free. And in way too many cases you simply can't design some valuable interaction without having people using your ideas on the wild. TL.DR. that link is a very good rule of thumb, but beware of the exceptions.