Planning from the start involves having a good spec. Demanding this is a case of making life easy for the developer at the cost of making it impossible for the customer. Thereby giving both sides plenty to complain about.

People typically are unable to envision the consequences of the spec they hand you without the feedback of seeing how it would work. With a rigid product cycle this leads to the classic conflict where the developers complain that the spec is incomplete and changing, and the clients complain that the developers do not understand what they want and are unresponsive to their needs. And they are both right. The spec is changing and that is a real problem for the developers. But human and fallible clients are unable to give you a decent spec 18 months out, things change!

Various incremental design techniques exist that try to get a rapid feedback cycle. A little more is specified, a little more is developed. Clients try it out and can figure out what they want added. Developers aim to have a design that can be readjusted and refactored.

This strategy is emphatically not a question of not taking time out to plan the project. Rather it is a question of intentionally using design strategies that have evolved to avoid the classic problems that come with more rigid strategies.

And yes, I have seen this kind of thinking applied (OK applied slightly hapazardly) to reasonably complex CGI projects that were based on a backend that deliberately had a lot of OO in it. (Well it didn't up front, but after a few iterations it did. :-)

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