A Tale of Two Systems (BA ch 2)

While reading this chapter, I almost started to break out in a cold sweat. I worked on a project that was The Metropolis. If you have been fortunate enough (or are young enough) to not have had the pleasure of working on such a project ... good for you. For those of us who have, you know that the experience is something that you will never forget. To this day that code still haunts me! Having survived it however, I will say that I think everyone needs to have the experience at least once in their lifetime to truly appreciate the benefits of a good architecture and development team.

As for the Design Town project, there were a couple of points the author brought up that I thought were interesting:

• Technical Debt - I like the concept. While I have never used this particular approach on any of my projects, I think it has potential.
• YAGNI - I see it all the time. Developers like to "over engineer" by nature. Yes, I understand that someday you may need it, but why not refactor the code when that day comes?
• Development Team Morale - I think organizations tend to underestimate the impact of morale on employee productivity and product quality. The relationship between architectural quality and morale is a two way street. A poor architecture leads to poor morale and poor morale leads to a poor architecture.