It's rough working on a project with little or no software design. I'm a little surprised by this, but after a year of being primarily independant or working with a very small company, it's been made very obvious. We try to do something up front in some quick analysis sessions, and even do some agile modeling (of sorts) to sketch out table/object relationships. But it's not long before the typical ruts happen - even the most agile of models can become difficult to update when you're effectively
an army of one, when you have no customer contact, and the real mastermind behind the project is extremely busy with their own projects.
I can come up with a system out of my ass, but there's so much time being spent doing forced thinking - and most of it off the cuff and right into the application server. Remarkably, most of it is turning out well - just slowly.