I don’t remember where and when I dug this picture but since then I keep it. It nicely visualizes a software development process.

Every time I come across famous Shakespeare’s trade off “to refactor or not refactor” I come back to this picture. You can keep going to put more and more cheap crutches preventing your house from irreversible falling down. It can help for sometime but at some point there will be a point of no return. Or you can get all the people out of the house for a while and rebuilt it of bricks.