Release It!, 2nd Edition

Use the Force

Your early decisions make the biggest impact on the eventual shape of your system. The earliest decisions you make can be the hardest ones to reverse later. These early decisions about the system boundary and decomposition into subsystems get crystallized into the team structure, funding allocation, program management structure, and even time-sheet codes. Team assignments are the first draft of the architecture. It’s a terrible irony that these very early decisions are also the least informed. The beginning is when your team is most ignorant of the eventual structure of the software, yet that’s when some of the most irrevocable decisions must be made.

I’ll reveal myself here and now as a proponent of agile development. The emphasis ...