Modularity - outside in

It is probably a pretty obvious thing, and yet some developers and software architects manage to overlook this.

When refactoring a project under the flag of "better modularity" one needs to start with northbound, southbound and other external interfaces - remove the coupling between the "big boxes" in the system, and only then go inside each box and improve its architecture. Otherwise we'll find ourselves redoing huge amounts of code over and over. Just moving your middle tier code base to JEE does not solve the problem... it is like adding meat balls to spaghetti, while what you really want is lasagna.

Just a thought.