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> Or just different data that leads to a different conclusion. Some of the YAGNI sceptics here have also been doing this stuff a long time, but apparently with

> Or just different data that leads to a different conclusion. Some of the YAGNI sceptics here have also been doing this stuff a long time, but apparently with quite different experiences to you. Purely a single data point, but I've been doing this on and off for 30 years, mostly enterprise, and agree that YAGNI is axiomatic to _efficient_ software delivery (most isn't built efficiently of course). And the bigger the project, the more pronounced this becomes. This leads to questions about what architecture must look like, since it needs to be extremely malleable to support YAGNI. RESTful and microservices based architectures seem to be optimal approaches based on this assumption. FWIW I've seen traditional enterprise solutions architecture approaches fail extremely hard against this worldview to the point that what looks like best practise in one world (e.g. stateful, transactional, end-to-end design) looks like worst in the other. (I don't think this is resolvable and notably causes huge friction for technical folk from 'the new world' going to work on giant programs populated by veterans who have spent long careers in a BDUF paradigm.)

Silhouette 11y ago
This leads to questions about what architecture must look like, since it needs to be extremely malleable to support YAGNI. Precisely. I think this is where some of us might be talking at cross-purposes. Given that implementing robust architecture typically requires work, even if the expectation is that it will be efficient in the long term, I don't see how one can reasonably argue for a flexible architecture to support future developments without considering what sorts of development are most likely to be necessary. Whether you choose to assume general programming principles or something more domain specific is just a matter of degree -- even a simple modular design is more work than spaghetti code in a trivial case, but I imagine most of us would agree that trying to keep things modular is highly likely to pay off for any project of non-trivial scale.

Silhouette 11y ago

This leads to questions about what architecture must look like, since it needs to be extremely malleable to support YAGNI. Precisely. I think this is where some of us might be talking at cross-purposes. Given that implementing robust architecture typically requires work, even if the expectation is that it will be efficient in the long term, I don't see how one can reasonably argue for a flexible architecture to support future developments without considering what sorts of development are most likely to be necessary. Whether you choose to assume general programming principles or something more domain specific is just a matter of degree -- even a simple modular design is more work than spaghetti code in a trivial case, but I imagine most of us would agree that trying to keep things modular is highly likely to pay off for any project of non-trivial scale.