There are no final decisions!
Anyone who has read The Pragmatic Programmer has heard this before and I know I keep discussing topics from the book but I just can not get enough. If you have been around the software development world for even a short period of time there is one constant lesson you have learned, and at some point probably the hard way. It boils down to one simple sentence. In software development there is one constant, CHANGE. This will hold true from projects that take a whole development team months to complete down to simple applications that take a single developer weeks to complete.
If we could just see this future this would never be a problem ,unfortunately this is the real world. If we can not see the future how are we to prepare. First you can prepare yourself by realizing that change will happen during the application development cycle. I try to remember that customers needs change so it is always best to anticipate these changes and try to bring them to the customer during the planning phase. The analysis of a project is the most important phase and way out of the scope of this post, just understand it is more important then your coding skills, however great they may be.
This is one part of application development I need to get better at. Right from my new handle book I would like to quote something that sums everything I have been talking about quite nice.
The mistake lies in assuming that any decision is cast in stone--and in not preparing for the contingencies that might arise. Instead of carving decisions in stone, think of them more as being written in the sand at the beach. A big wave can come along and wipe them out at any time.
