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Making thoughtful softw.are design a main business practice.
When it comes to software design, perhaps a plumber can help enlighten organizations a bit. As developer-advocate Mat Ryer spelled out in a recent post, a plumber looking at the all-too-complicated handiwork underneath his sink summed up the problem in a nutshell:

So, in an enterprise, layer upon layer, bell upon whistle, feature upon feature, workaround upon workaround, gets bolted in and built up, resulting in spaghetti messes that require a lot of investment to clear up, if even possible.

There's plenty of pressure on software developers and designers to push things out the door as fast as possible, and between requirements meetings with users, coding, integration and testing, there's precious little time to sit back and consider the ramifications on overall design. Perhaps there needs to be more thought given to what becomes important piece of the developer experience, and ultimately, the user or customer experience. Jonas Downey, a designer at Basecamp, puts it this way: perhaps it's a good idea to "move slowly and fix things."

"Our work is heavy and it's getting heavier all the time," he writes. "We obsess over every aspect of that process: the tech we use, our methodology, the way it looks, and how it performs. Unfortunately we're not nearly as obsessed with what happens after that, when people integrate our products into the real world." Software is woven into the fabric of every business, and into the lives of just about everyone on the planet, he points out.