Agile modelling
A truly excellent article on Scaling Agile development through architecture over at Agile Journal. We’ve been discovering a lot of these rules ourselves are our project size and complexity increases, and I can recommend them all.
It’s still difficult though — we’ve certainly found that sometimes it’s virtually impossible to predict all the key points of an architecture early. The old agile stalwarts of good test coverage and lots-and-lots-of-refactoring have to come in.