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It can be worth agonizing over the decisions early on while the system is simple and easy to change. Later on it's often not logistically, politically or social
by nly 4y ago
It can be worth agonizing over the decisions early on while the system is simple and easy to change. Later on it's often not logistically, politically or socially justifiable to go back and fix or improve an original bad design decision and re-base and retest everything built on it.
The result is engineers sat around muttering "I told you so" to themselves and wasting weeks debugging and hacking around bugs.
- duckmysick 4y agoSure. Now we need to know when it can be worth. If we do it all the time we're back to the starting point of this discussion.
- pydry 4y agoI find that the agonizing rarely bears as much fruit as doing. In some cases we've deployed, found horrible problems that were completely unexpected and switched course. Additional time spent agonizing would just have delayed getting us to the point where we learned those things. The critical information we needed to make that decision wasnt going to reveal itself with additional introspection. This isnt to day when a dev waves a big red flag in the beginning you should ignore them, though (ever). But, I find that waving that red flag doesnt ever inhibit delivery speed whereas multiple people agonizing over decisions where the information to determine the "right" one usually does.