We all want to have good longterm software architecture. Build it right the first time. But some organizations fall into the trap of trying to get a perfect design before they start building.
They include more stakeholders, try to plan for contingencies, develop a high availability strategy.
Those things are all good to have. But you don’t need them before you have users. If you have no users you shouldn’t be thinking about high availability. If your product doesn’t work yet you don’t need scalability.
Users > working product > scaling limitations > high availability
Another problem is having a committee to approve architecture proposals. One or two people is fine. But having three or more people who can block the start of the project is a recipe for pointless delays.
The reason we switched to agile methodologies is because it’s hard to know what the difficulties will be before you start building the software.
Be careful to structure your organization such that design doesn’t become more important than delivery.
A working product with customers is always more valuable than a product that doesn’t have customers but is highly available.
A design budget is a way to avoid falling into this trap. Simply budget a week or a month or whatever for designing up front. At the end of that time enforce a hard stop on doing more design. No more committee reviews or deliberation. If the architecture isn’t developed enough to start building, do a spike on a smaller scale.