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Managed Chaos
Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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When does Design begin?

I used to think that Design really beginnings once you have the requirement (user story) in place. Over the years, I have learnt that design is not just a phase on the project. Design is quite intertwined with other activities we do during development and is spread through-out the life-cycle of a project. IMHO, there’s no discrete point in time on your project when you are not designing. To put some meat to this topic, let me share a recent experience with you which will reinforce my point.

A good buddy of mine, (who had been a TDD practitioner for a while) called me up and told me to have a look at some code. He was not very comfortable with the way the classes were interact with each other (design smell). I looked over the code and I agreed with him. The classes depended on each other in an awkward manner. Then I looked at the tests and I felt the tests were not really right. Could not tell why exactly, but something did not seem right. I asked him to show me the user story he was working on. I looked at the story and I realized what was happening. The way he had his story broken down, was quite different from how I would break it.

So I asked him, if I could give a shot at breaking down the stories differently. We spent some time and came up with user stories that kind of make sense to me. That was followed by a short TDD sessions. We got rid of the awkward class dependency issue, but ran into another issue. Well that’s not the point. What’s important here is, we realized that breaking down the user story differently lead to a very different design. What does this mean? We concluded saying, the way we create our user stories can impact the software design. So by breaking the user stories differently one can lead to a different design. Hence while we are creating/breaking down user stories, we are making design decisions.

We can take this one step further. I’ve had experience on real projects where depending on the order in which we developed our stories, the design evolved differently. Jeff Patton likes to say that when the stakeholders take a decision of building software to solve a business problem, they have made a design decision.

Conclusion: Design begins way before we think it actually does. We know Prototyping and TDD is a great way to validate those design decision. Don’t forget the best feedback is got when actual user use your software. Hence try to realse as frequently as possible. May be on a daily basis.


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