To Plan or Not To Plan

To Plan or Not To Plan

XP says to do a good job (tests, refactoring, communication) of solving today's job today and trust your ability to add complexity in the future where you need it." It has indeed been my experience that it's hard to predict the future. It's not necessarily just predicting the future that's hard, though, it's understanding the whole problem. At the beginning, you don't understand the problem enough to know what to design. You discover a lot about the problem space by implementing the code. Coding is almost like exploring the space. You discover more and more detailed information about the problem space as you explore it by coding.

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