My policy on projects that I control is that we never add a feature unless the design can support it simply.

This drives some people crazy, notably people who have no concept of the future. They start to foam at the mouth and say things like, "We can't wait! This feature is so important!" or "Just put it in now and we'll just clean it up later!" They don't realize that this is their normal attitude. They're going to say the same thing about the next feature.

It'll be Frankenstein's monster, jammed together out of broken parts. And just like the friendly green giant, it'll be big, ugly, unstable, and harmful to your health.

Now just adding a tiny little piece and refactoring it afterward is fine. Landing a huge feature that the architecture can't support and then trying to clean it up afterward is a terrible task. Size matters.

Starting the Right Way

The worst situation is when you let people keep adding features with no design for months or years, and then one day you wake up and realize that something is not right. Now you have to fix your whole codebase. This is a terrible task, because just like adding a new feature, it can't be done all at once, unless you want to re-write.

If you want to start doing things the right way, you have to start doing things the right way. And that means that you have to fix the design piece by piece, in simple steps. That usually requires months or years of effort – totally wasted effort, because you should have just designed from the start. You should have thought about the future.