One of the most counter-intuitive ideas baked into Agile software development is the concept of the last responsible moment, as Jeff Atwood writes about. In a nutshell, the idea is this: Since it is best to make decisions with the most information possible, we should wait until the last responsible moment to do so, because it’s at that moment we’ll have the most information available to us. Clearly, to buy into this concept, we must make a few assumptions. First, we must assume that the passing of time does, in fact, allow us to gather more information. If this doesn’t happen — say, we all go on vacation for 2 weeks and put the whole bit out of our minds — then the concept is bust. However, this [...]