Designing Software for Change: The Engineering Discipline Behind Systems That Survive Growth
Every software system begins with a lie.
Not a malicious lie. A useful one.
We pretend we understand the domain. We pretend the API shape is obvious. We pretend the database model will remain stable. We pretend the team that builds version one will be the same team maintaining version five. We pretend the product roadmap is a sequence of known requirements instead of a negotiation with reality.
Then reality arrives.
A pricing model changes. A customer segment behaves differently than expected. A compliance requirement appears. A third-party dependency becomes unreliable. A feature built for 10,000 users is suddenly asked to support 10 million events per day. The engineer who understood the old billing flow leaves the company. The “temporary” integration becomes business-critical.
At that moment, the quality of a software system is no longer measured by how elegantly it solved yesterday’s problem. It is measured by how safely it...
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