Software Architect's Handbook

Change is inevitable

Change is one of the few things that you can count on and it is inevitable for software systems. It occurs during the course of the initial development as well as throughout its life during maintenance.

There was a time when we had a greater sense of control over real-world processes and what needed to take place as part of those processes. A big, up-front design would take place before any code was written. In an effort to exert control, software architects tried to predict and plan for every future contingency as we designed our systems. Software systems were viewed as being more static than we view them today, with behavior that would stay consistent over time.

As we know, software systems modeled after the real world ...