Premature Configurability Design Smell

Premature Configurability is making some aspect of your application configurable (or data driven) before anyone has ever asked for a change to that part of the system.

This is a topic I have been contemplating for a while. I started writing this post at least 5 different times, but I was never satisfied with my results. Fortunately, Alex Papadimoulis of The Daily WTF recently presented on the topic at Code PaLOUsa and he said everything I wanted to say. He refers to the smell as Soft Coding. Please watch his presentation and read his post on the topic.

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