How to Balance Brevity and Abstraction

If you're not able to do stress testing for whatever reason, then you have some things to think about. There is a balance there and so many people jump on one side of the line or the other that they never hit right down the middle. The whole thing of getting to the point where you have 20 layers of abstraction is almost more of a hindrance than having a fairly concise set of code. That may not be all that gorgeous and object oriented or whatever, but it's easy to maintain and it'seasy to see what's going on.