Selecting the (right?) application design

Question

While working to build software products for early stage startups, I have seen two very common schools of thought that define an approach to application design.

Those 2 paradigms typically include designing an application predicated on an "extendible codebase” or a "throw away codebase".

What factors should one consider/measure to identify their approach to application design? What are alternatively ways to think about application design?

Some factors suggested to date include:

• the amount of time available to build the product.
• the total amount of budget available.
• the level of quality.

Answer 1

It depends on how easy it will be to convince the powers that be to throw away the live prototype.

You see as soon as prototype / proof of concept, goes live, it becomes a real live system. And the "powers that be" will want you to make modifications and changes, and whilst this happens it will gain real world use, and then it is not so easy to replace.

And you make these modifications and fixes, the user base will grow, and the external quality of the system will improve, and the internal quality will reduce. And the updates will become harder and harder, and slower and slower, and technical debt will grow and grow.

And you will say, we need to replace the system, it was only ever supposed to be a proof of concept, and they will say, but it works, and we have spent so much time and money on it, surely we can continue, and if you fold to the demands, you will continue, and internal quality will sink and sink, and 1 year from start, they will not even acknowledge that it was a throw away prototype, and you will be lumped with maintenance nightmares, and questions about the quality of your implementation.

I have learned the hard way, do it right first time. Some turds are hard to sink.

Answer 2

For a startup, what are the pros and cons of building a software product predicated on "Throw away code" vs "an extendible codebase"?

In reality, if you phrase the question as "either one or the other", it might reduce your options significantly. I feel like you kind of answered already the pros and cons in the question, so I'll try to exercise the real question:

I don't know of a single startup success story where people take their time to build a good system. Time to market is king, and like you said, going against it can increase significantly the risk of going out of business.

"Doing right" has serious problems in the first moments of a startup. One, it requires experienced engineers (which requires money); two, it requires unbounded time (depends on the complexity of the product and the experience of the engineers with this kind of system). Finally, we all know you don't need good design to be in business, you need something that runs, and whose problems are hidden from your customers.

Pretty much any startup experience I know of (and probably every single famous one) took big advantage of this fact: if part of your product is poor quality, but that part is invisible to the customer (or their potential desire is not significantly affected by it), don't waste time on improving it, just ship it.

But that is "time 0" in the time scale. In time t > 0 you begin to learn what most startups learn the hard way: the poor quality of those invisible parts is constraining your current opportunities. That is, the team is requiring much more time to implement new features, these are being shipped half baked, bugs are bugging the customers and making them angry, etc.

tangent: at this point, hopefully the manager knows the capital sin of software engineering and would not fall into the myth of the man-month.

The difference that makes the difference here is to know at which time t you should pause, hold the horses, and put some effort into cleaning the house before you sink (and how much time dedicated to and how much cleaning should be done).

In other words, this is not solved by selecting either "Throw away code" vs "an extendible codebase" once at the beginning, closing your eyes and running in the chosen direction. You can solve it by putting the "time" in the equation and acknowledging there is a question you should make from time to time, and from time to time, it might require opposing answers.

In summary, instead of having a static "time vs. cost vs. quality" pick-two-triangle, put these in a time scale:

_{(source: metareload.com)}

Now, take into consideration that, at any t, cost and time for developing a feature depends on the resulting quality of the product at t-1. In other words, how much quality of design you chose to invest right now is telling how cheap or onerous the future developments will be (so, quality is the variable that tells you the cost of your future).

If you are a manager, this point of view can give you more clues about how to manage the tension between design quality and time to market. And that is something to be managed constantly.

Finally, experienced engineers are optimized for design. And if you have very good ones, you can push time constraints on them and they will make a significant effort into selecting critical parts of the system to dedicate to design and testing, and will let less-critical parts to be of lesser quality -- they know these have messes that are more easily manageable and the trade-off for quick delivery pays off. You can also count on them to put some breaks at the incoming demands and tell you that this is the t moment they should stop and work on the code base to make room for new maneuvers. In other words, what you're doing is "amortizing" the total cost of good design (and risks) by spreading it through prioritized parts of the system and through time.

Answer 3

Are you confident that you will deliver "extendible solution" - that will not turn into the "prototype" due to time constraints and unexpected requirements?

I believe what happens most often is that the "prototype" becomes the product - with all its shortcomings and imperfectness it still actually works. Startups that go for ultimate solution most often run out of funding and never deliver.