When inception exceeds elaboration

The inception phase of any software development life cycle is supposed to be the first phase. Even if you are hacking away on something you dreamed of the night before. You still woke up, and thought "I'm going to try this out. Even if it doesn't work, at least I'll know". And that was the inception. You thought of something cool and made the decision to code it.

Even in these trivial cases, there is still a very brief inception phase. Which is how it should be. Well, maybe a little longer than five minutes. But you should never be thinking "Oh wow. This idea is so great. This is going to revolutionize the way people use computers." for too long without actually building anything. Design something right away at the very least. Even jotting down some simple notes is often enough to let yourself or a team member know if you are completely out to lunch.

If you hold on to ideas for too long, you also run the risk of skipping elaboration entirely. Again, this applies to all software development. Even if you are hacking away, at least you started hacking right away. It is an infinitely bad idea to have this great idea for a very long time and assume that thinking about it, or even talking with team members about it, is the elaboration. Because it isn't. Thinking so spells nothing but failure.