Jon Udell writes about an interview with Ward Cunningham. Ward points out:

The real challenge is to break that cycle. To get the programming fast enough so that it's not a boat anchor. I see two ways to do that. First, make sure the programming has longevity, so we can keep modifying it and keep it correct, without becoming gigantic and brittle. And another, frankly, is to program less.

So how pray tell can we achieve this? Well my quick answer would be to adopt an Adaptive Object Model and second to use higher level language constructs ( Read my previous blogs on these topics to get more detail). Jon Udell however believes Scripting is the answer, however without powerful refactoring tools, scripting would be a poor substitute compared to Java.

Ward also brings up another interesting point:

There are lots of things we can program, but just because we can doesn't mean we should...There's a real tradeoff. Is this function worth writing?

Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun, has also some insight on Refactoring the Enterpise, he has a whitepaper entitled "Real Time Enterprises - A Continuous Migration Approach". His take on this comprises of the following:

• Federation NOT Integration
• Configuration NOT Customization
• Reliable and Self Recovering
• Evolutionary NOT Revolutionary