1) Apply conscious planning and forethought. Some things are clearly going to be used a lot, some things might not. Use bolt-on hacks where appropriate, invest time for things you expect to be using forever.
2) When the longevity of the tool is not easy to pin down, test it out with a hack. Spend 1 day adding Stripe the hacky way, and keep a slushbucket of time budgeted for revisiting experimental hacks that look like they will last a while.
That's my general approach, anyway. Most of the time, a hack is good enough and anything more is a waste of time. The story is admittedly a little different for me though; for me, software is a tool to do my job- software is not my job.
I think I see it differently as we have just spent 3 years developing a CMS at our company and every decision has been a well thought out and concious one. We spent 3 weeks planning when we first conceived the plan.
We have only had to do 2 refactors in that time on 2 controls. That was more about understanding our customers needs more as we progressed rather than not enough planning though.
Previous to that I built a custom ecommerce site for a wholesale distributor. That whole process was more suited to a quick hack over a well thought out decision. That's why I say I agree in principle, so long as the project allows it.
Comments
This is why you need to do two things:
1) Apply conscious planning and forethought. Some things are clearly going to be used a lot, some things might not. Use bolt-on hacks where appropriate, invest time for things you expect to be using forever.
2) When the longevity of the tool is not easy to pin down, test it out with a hack. Spend 1 day adding Stripe the hacky way, and keep a slushbucket of time budgeted for revisiting experimental hacks that look like they will last a while.
That's my general approach, anyway. Most of the time, a hack is good enough and anything more is a waste of time. The story is admittedly a little different for me though; for me, software is a tool to do my job- software is not my job.
I think I see it differently as we have just spent 3 years developing a CMS at our company and every decision has been a well thought out and concious one. We spent 3 weeks planning when we first conceived the plan.
We have only had to do 2 refactors in that time on 2 controls. That was more about understanding our customers needs more as we progressed rather than not enough planning though.
Previous to that I built a custom ecommerce site for a wholesale distributor. That whole process was more suited to a quick hack over a well thought out decision. That's why I say I agree in principle, so long as the project allows it.