When you have good refactoring tools, a lot of this is significantly less issue. So, design for easy refactorabilitym lack of repetition and readability.
I dont like "used the simplest solution possible" advice, because people who I claimed doing that in real life tended to do unmaintainable spaghetti mess. It was "simple" in the sense of not having abstractions or nested function calls, but hard to read and understand big picture. Sometimes generic is a way to untangle such previous spaghetti mess. As in, it is second step on the road that requires 2 steps till it is really good.
Understand politics. A lot of those "future cases" are things that analysis or management requires initially or indirectly. They are also often result of trying to hit vague requirements - you dont know what customer really needs in enough detail, so you do it configurable in the hope of hitting the right place too. They are also situations in which people burned out in the past or special cases of special cases.
Otherwise said, the complicated thing is often requirement, initially. Someone had reason to ask for it or thought to have reason. It gets forgotten and ignored after a while in which case it is ok to cut it off.
I dont like "used the simplest solution possible" advice, because people who I claimed doing that in real life tended to do unmaintainable spaghetti mess. It was "simple" in the sense of not having abstractions or nested function calls, but hard to read and understand big picture. Sometimes generic is a way to untangle such previous spaghetti mess. As in, it is second step on the road that requires 2 steps till it is really good.
Understand politics. A lot of those "future cases" are things that analysis or management requires initially or indirectly. They are also often result of trying to hit vague requirements - you dont know what customer really needs in enough detail, so you do it configurable in the hope of hitting the right place too. They are also situations in which people burned out in the past or special cases of special cases.
Otherwise said, the complicated thing is often requirement, initially. Someone had reason to ask for it or thought to have reason. It gets forgotten and ignored after a while in which case it is ok to cut it off.