Prefactoring: Think About the Big Picture

Think About the Big Picture: Decisions within a system should be congruent with the big picture.  What does that mean? It is all about context, with the context being the system's architecture and business purpose.  The definition of architecture that I've come to love is "important things that are expensive to change".  For some systems, the message format could be considered part of the architecture because it spikes through all layers of the system.  For other systems the use of the Java EE stack would probably be part of the architecture because it would be a lot of work to shift to a POJO model.  If you can somehow get the entire team to share a vision of the architecture and make sure the important decisions are made based on the context of the architecture and its primary purpose, the project has a better chance of succeeding.