Sadly, such reckless thinking is often encouraged in corporate world. Due to time constraints, a misguided manager may instruct his team to skip over design work and just start hacking away. This makes team seem focused and productive, but this strategy can wreak havoc on project timeline. What’s more, resultant code is often a tangled, poorly documented, chaotic mess. If this software must be maintained for years to come, then you have a recipe for disaster.

Mind you, I’m not saying that an elaborate design is always necessary. If time is short, then one might not have luxury of an intricate software plan with exhaustive design documentation. However, one should at least have a general software architecture laid out—one which is detailed enough to make software development process smoother and easier. Programmers rarely err on side of over-planning, but they frequently fall into trap of insufficient design detail. Don’t make this mistake, if you really want to save time.