Re: The Cost of Change Curve

--- In extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com, Ron Jeffries 
<ronjeffries <at> X...> wrote:
> On Thursday, April 1, 2004, at 8:41:21 AM, yahoogroups <at> j... wrote:
> 
> > The fact is that there are going to be architectural
> > design decisions that will be difficult to change; this
> > is where experiance comes into play, because a lot
> > of them seem to be avoidable (or at least amenable
> > to impact reduction) if you know the secrets of the
> > masters. (I'm not a master, don't ask me for the
> > secrets.)
> 
> How do we know that this is a fact?

We dont in absolute terms but is so closely approximates one that we 
take it as such. If your talking about "architectural" changes then 
its stuff like moving responsibilities for persisting information 
between subsystems, or adding (or removing or changing) entire 
processing tiers e.g. introducing/removing a layer of caching.

There will always be potential changes that take a significant 
proportion of the effort of writing the entire system because they 
touch so much code. Now if you use the argument that "any change is 
easy no matter how sweeping because its just code and code is easy to 
change" then this argument must also apply proportionately to 
completely rewritting a system and/or developing one from scratch - 
and it patently isnt "easy" to develop a non-tricial system or we 
wouldnt all need be employed doing just that.

Paul C.

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