…..Even worse than not being visible to the customer, work done on
designing the system is not visible to the management of the company
that is developing the system. Even though managers will pay lip
service to the teaching of The Mythical Man Month,
there is still the worry that engineers who aren’t producing code are
not doing anything useful. While there are few companies that
explicitly measure productivity in lines-of-code per week, there is
still pressure to produce something that can be seen. The notion that
design can take weeks or months and that during that time little or no
code will be written is hard to sell to managers. Harder still is
selling the notion that any code that does get written will be thrown
away, which often appears to be regression rather than progress.