Beautiful Architecture Chapter 2: A Tale of Two systems

Even though I have only been in the professional software field for a little over 2 years, I have already seen some of the problems associated with a “Messy Metropolis”. Not on the same scale as the book, but the problems were the same. If only all software is designed with care just like “Design Town”, it would make our jobs a lot easier. But the sad truth we all will probably all have at least one “Messy Metropolis” story by the time we retire.

The author does point out that business pressure was one of the factors that made Metropolis fail, but as Will pointed out, didn't really go into the business pressure of the successful case. Maybe the author feels that since the project was a success, that either the pressure was very little or non existent. Now maybe he has a point that the business pressure in the successful project must have been manageable since it did get done and got done with good design. That still does not mean that the team was not under any stress. I am sure there were still late nights to make a deadline.

I also liked the concept of YAGNI. I was working on a group project once and one member insisted on added functions that, if we needed them, would make things easier. We ended up not using them and that engineer wasted valuable time implementing those features and that time could of spent fixing bugs.