Ripeness for Refactoring

Two of my guiding principles for development are mottoes I heard repeatedly from emergency medicine professionals:

1. "Don't just do something, stand there!" Are you sure enough that the first "obvious" response is going to do significantly less harm than good? If not, wait a second, think, and try again;

2. "If you don't write it down, it never happened." At least not the way you (think you) remember it, and what you do remember is lacking a detail that will turn out to be critically important. Having information that you trust, available at need in usable form, leads to dramatically better decisions out to several sigma from the mean.

"There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over." I'm currently employed in one of the most pathological examples of this that I've come across in a 35-year career. Development using agile processes is a game-changer, but it's the worst of all worlds when the most essential things that make for agile development — like pairing, or small iterations — are cast aside because "we don't have time for that".