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(not so much of a reply, but more of my thoughts on the discussion in the replies)

I would say the topic is two-sided.

The first is when we do greenfield development (maybe, of some new part of an already existent software): the domain is not really well known and the direction of the future development is even less so. So, there is not much to think about: document what is known, make a rough layout of the system, and go coding. Too much investing in the design at the early stages may result in something (a) overcomplicated, (b) missing very important parts of the domain and thus irrelevant to the problem, (c) having nothing to do with how the software will evolve.

The second (and it is that side I think the post is about) is when we change some already working part. This time it pays hugely to ponder on how to best accommodate the change (and other information the request to make this change brings to our understanding of the domain) into the software before jumping to code. This way I've managed to reduce what was initially thought to take days (if not weeks) of coding to writing just a couple of lines or even renaming an input field in our UI. No amount of exploratory coding of the initial solution would result in such tremendous savings in development time and software complexity.



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