Project success depends heavily on a team's ability to quickly incorporate new requirements and deliver solid results. Although most organizations have an appetite for the benefits that can be realized using extreme programming, many cannot commit to a methodology that minimizes upfront documentation and design and promotes pair programming. Whichever methodology you choose for your next project, refactoring, test-driven development, and continuous integration should be a part of it.

Building binary components sometimes means utilizing late binding and reflection to find the code with the particular functionality you need. Reflection is a powerful tool, and it enables you to write software that is much more dynamic. Using reflection, an application can be upgraded with new capabilities by adding new components that were not available when the application was deployed. That's the upside.

Most developers just focus on getting the initial code done, ignoring the important questions that ultimately affect the total cost of development such as: how do I test, how do I document in case I become unavailable, and how do I write flexible code?