Architecting for immediate need or future flexibility
March 23rd, 2007
Ask The Wizard, one of the guys behind Feedburner has a great article about the tradeoffs behind taking more time to build a flexible architecture compared to rolling out a product that solves immediate customer need. Read it here!.
My favorite piece:
Let’s start off with a few hypotheses. Some of these you will take for granted and others you may argue:
1. Extensible architectures generally provide more long-term business value than point solutions, although point solutions may monetize a specific market more quickly
2. Software that hasn’t been released can be changed in ways that become less possible N customers after launch. As N grows, so does the difficulty in refactoring some percentage of infrastructure or functionality. Additionally, as more than 1 copy of the software is released into production, these difficulties multiply.
3. You have no idea what capabilities the market will want from your software in one year
4. Customers generally value functionality and speed of ROI over flexibility and extensibility, however in order to maximize your chances for long-term success, your business values flexibility and extensibility over specific functionality.
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