It's so, so hard to resist the siren song of premature optimization, though. It's even harder in a corporate environment where "Well, why didn't you plan for that?" is a question lurking behind every failure or delay. Overplanning isn't punished.
In startups, almost everything is punished by company failure.
Another example is failing to plan ahead far enough that you can maintain your first mover advantage when a competitor comes along and already has the benefit of learning from your mistakes so far.
This is becoming less true over time. As enterprises start adopting Lean practices, it becomes obvious to everyone why building something now when you won't use it for months is waste.
If there's one thing enterprises don't give a flying fsck about, it's waste.
After a couple decades of mostly-enterprise development, I've learned something really important - it's better to not be wrong than to be right. Thus the overbuilding and risk aversion. Frankly, this is the only real advantage startups have over the enterprise - the ability to take risk.
My limited experience in that world was that there often wasn't a really good way of identifying when something was in fact 'right', only that it wasn't broken (whenever it was reviewed/inspected). New info could always come along which would call in to question previous decisions, and new people would come in with different (or no) understanding of previous stages.
Couple that with organizations in which everyone is free to say 'no' to things, or they're free to chime in with demands without having to actually commit resources for dev or support, and you get weird situations (I've got a few war stories, as I'm sure many people here do too).
I disagree. If overbuilding or over planning is wrong. Then the question comes as to why you spent $200k building a feature that just got thrown out. Or worse, they try to use a unneeded feature just to justify the fact that it was built.
I didn't say it isn't wrong. I said it isn't punished. That's a very, very different thing.
Enterprise environments encourage toxic behavior in numerous ways. This is one of them. Risk aversion is generally more important than cost control in the enterprise. Conway's Law in action, if you think about it.
It's so, so hard to resist the siren song of premature optimization, though. It's even harder in a corporate environment where "Well, why didn't you plan for that?" is a question lurking behind every failure or delay. Overplanning isn't punished.