I just stumbled upon a blog posting by Chad Myers titled “Good Design is not Subjective.” It’s hard for me to believe, but apparently this is a controversial subject in the software community today.

Recently, when playing FreeCell to take my mind off an essay I was writing, a thought occurred to me: FreeCell illustrates the value of upfront analysis and design. On a number of essays on yuwantitwhen.com, I’ve advocated that doing proper upfront analysis and design on our software projects is the best way to secure success for your projects and to shorten schedules. Similarly, in FreeCell, I’ve won more games on the first try when I devoted more time to upfront analysis and developing a strategy.

Proper up front analysis and design is required, and yes, sometimes it takes longer than we’d all like it to take. However, when it’s done well, architectures are less complex, not more; quality is higher; time to market is faster, and products and teams are more agile. Proper architectures leverage the resources of the entire organization to deliver solutions to customers.