Design Up Front Is Investment

That is, it's not necessarily income. It's income only if you're right.

Why are you and/or other people wrong so often? This degree of failure, a degree which people will resort to extreme and often bizarre measures to counteract, is completely alien to me. How is it failure seems to be the rule, not the exception? In most other professions this is not the case. Is it rational to expect people who frequently seem to make bad decisions to suddenly make correct decisions because of a methodology? It doesn't seem reasonable.

It is not failure that ought to be the rule, but anticipation of the possibility of failure. -- MikeSmith

Most investors are wrong most of the time. It's not because they are incompetent, it's because the market is inherently unpredictable. Just like software. Did you know that one of the most successful investment strategies is a simple rule called BuyAndHold? It's not successful because it makes your predictions more accurate, it's successful because it side-steps the prediction process altogether and focuses on the end result - making money. Instead of micromanaging predictions, it takes advantage of the macrobehaviour of the market (which is that, in the long run, the market tends to grow). This is almost directly analogous to Yagni, except they use different tactics to achieve the same strategy; their philosophies are the very similar. In software, predictions are usually wrong, except for those rare situations where you are in a position to have a sure thing. Yagni ignores the microprediction process in favour of the macrobehaviour of the requirements (which is that, in the long run, most requirements change drastically between the time they are conceived and the time they are actually needed).

See DesignDebt