Martin Fowler today has tossed out a hypothesis on the value of design.
Here's my anecodtal reference point. A large app we had on our platform was constructed very quickly, with shortcuts, to meet a fast approaching deadline that would not be extended. It started with a reasonable design and some good ideas, but time constraints forced the developers away from their design.
Almost exactly as that app launched to the public, work started on the next generation of that application. This time, still under time constraints, but with a larger more experieinced team that was able to make much fewer sacrifices. The codebases quickly diverged, and within one year the first one was considered to be extremely confusing. It was difficult or impossible to even just fix bugs or troubleshoot production problems. The remaining functionality that the first had was moved to the second.
The second is still around today, the team has turned over or been reassigned several times, yet it's still possible to add meaningful features in a quarter release cycle, and the app performs very well on production.
For me, attention to detail, design, domain driven design, and focusing on readable code are clearly worth it.
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