Will Read's blog
Developers need to do stuff that you will never ask them to do, and if they asked you if it was ok to do it, you would tell them, "Let's do something else." I'm not talking about "gold-plating" an app, or the kind of thing an "architect astronaut" would cook up, I'm talking about real value-adding tasks that are near-impossible to assign a direct business value.
When I joined the project, we went from one pair, to two. Today, we're three pairs, six people strong. But the communication paths now are far more numerous than the one pair days.
There's a debate right now in my team about how to handle a "code freeze", a debate which I find myself on the outside of the majority. The idea behind the code freeze is that one stack of our app will be "frozen" through the holiday season, with few if any changes between now and January. Meanwhile, we'll keep on developing AND releasing to a separate stack.