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0 pointsgr4vityWall6mo ago0 comments

While I tend to agree with your position, it sounds like they built a system in less than 2 weeks that was immediately useful to the organization. That sounds like a win to me, and makes me wonder if there were other ways in hindsight that such a system could evolve.

>They thought that we could avoid months of work and keep it simple and instead caused years of mess because making breaking changes is extremely difficult once you have wide adoption.

Right. Do you think a middle ground was possible? Say, a system that took 1 month to build instead of two weeks, but with a few more abstractions to help with breaking changes in the future.

Thanks for sharing your experience btw, always good to read about real world cases like this from other people.

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motorest6mo ago

> While I tend to agree with your position, it sounds like they built a system in less than 2 weeks that was immediately useful to the organization. That sounds like a win to me, and makes me wonder if there were other ways in hindsight that such a system could evolve.

I don't think this is an adequate interpretation. Quick time to market doesn't mean the half-baked MVP is the end result.

An adequate approach would be to include work on introducing the missing abstraction layer as technical debt to be paid right after launch. You deliver something that works in 2 weeks and then execute the remaining design as follow-up work. This is what technical debt represents, and why the "debt" analogy fits so well. Quick time to market doesn't force anyone to put together half-assed designs.

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