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Discussion on: Turning greenfield projects into brownfields projects

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Frank Puffer • Edited

I am not sure if I understand your section on architecture correctly. I also don't know what exactly you mean by architecture. My favourite definition of Architecture is

All the things that are hard to change later.

These things can normally not be avoided. Therefore it is obviously good to recogize and document them as early as possible in a project.

So architecture is unavoidable but it is nice to have it reduced to the bare minimum because requirements will change. Or at least our understanding of these requirements will change.

But what I often see is that additional and unneccessary architecture is deliberately created by people who believe that they can predict the future. Well, these aren't special people, it's us - most of us like to predict the future but, let's face it, all of us absolutely suck at it.

Having too little architecture is dangerous. Having too much of it is even worse. I have seen too many projects where seemingly trivial change requests caused excessive cost because they didn't match the original architecture.