> It's a horrible moniker for the concept and most people who use it don't really mean piecemeal growth at all. What they do talk about is usually design where some shortcut allows you to quickly accomplish a short-term goal while completely ignoring long-term consequences. This is the mentality that I see everywhere in the software industry today.

I think the moniker is perfect because that is exactly what piecemeal growth is in nature. That's why code seems to have a biological feel. The rough bit, for we humans, is that code tends toward piecemeal growth because of the economics of change. It is easier to add to something that exists than to make something new, so entities (functions, classes, services) tend to grow in size. We have to step in, as gardeners in a way, to guide structure.

I don't know that it was intended by the original people behind micro-services (Fred George comes to mind), but micro-services are a good example of aligning with natural tendency rather than attempting to impose a design and continually falling short. Part of the intent was that you just rewrite a micro-service when it becomes unmaintainable. That's a direct structural correspondence to apoptosis in biology. Cells live for a while, then they are replaced.