I've noticed this cute project called AndroMDA. It's a plugin for maven1 that focuses around Model Driven development. They've put this quote from Machiavelli on the front page:
"And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions..."

-- Niccolo Machiavelli
We've had the need to modify our project's model quite a bit during the development of our application and it basically happened in the last two months. I am convinced that if we'd gone out sooner to get in touch with our end users we'd have jumped the need of modifying the model in the end phase of development when the only thing we were supposed to do now was bug fixing. This I guess is a common problem, management having fears that someone might steal the idea, or that the potential buyer would be discouraged by bugs. However, going beta early gets valuable user feedback, and helps shape the product to what the user needs and in the end this is the objective that every good software project has to nail.
I quoted this thing as every time we have to change the model we get goosebumps of what might go wrong, will it introduce instability, bugs, or will it simply be incompatible with the old model. I guess some things don't change, even after 500 years.

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