Is Design Dead?

Is Design Dead?

So far, all the articles I've read are in their majority speculations and theories about the importance of good designing and the future of software development techniques and strategies. This one wasn't the exception. One thing that called my attention is how Mr. Fowler talks about extreme programming as a common way of working in the industry, as he explains how different patterns could be use to produce more efficient software and yet is ignored under the premise of quickness. He talks once again about the complexity of reversibility when its main purpose is to make designing and building much easier, and also introduces new terms to me like the evolutionary design.

I can relate to his experiences and stories about how we are so used to program thinking constantly in the future use of software and often fall far from the original purpose of the program. It is really difficult to just ignore your inner common sense when supposing you should add extra features to make things easier in the future, when the real progress lies in actually working on what it is needed and not what might or could be needed. 

Despite the tips and recommendations and the topics the author talks about, I can't help to think that these ideas and proposals were very theoretical and experimental to their times, and even as they could be very important to gather the knowledge and understand it to keep progressing into modern designing and architecture, I would like to if their has been a major progress in the pattern design stigma nowadays and if extreme programming is still a thing (I've never heard about it before). I would find it quite curious if today's practices are pretty much the same as 20 years ago, because this means that even as technology kept growing, our methods and ability to exploit it could've not grow that much.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

War Games

War Games War Games is a sci-fi movie from 1983 that narrates the story of David Lightman, a teenager that trying to hack into what he thought was a videogame development company accessed instead into a top secret military base computer and initialized a "game" called Global Thermonuclear War, which ran a simulation of a nuclear war between the USSR and the USA, driving everybody mad as they thought the simulation was a real deal, and giving a head start to a potential World War 3. Even though it is considered a classic, I must admit I had never seen the movie, not even heard about it. I watched it without knowing a thing about the plot, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to be honest. However there are a lot of things that I found a little absurd and highly unlikely to occur in real life. The plot itself, for instance. Just to think that a kid by accident has the ability to enter a military base is something I found too fictional to my taste, even when we are talking...
Read more

Software Architecture

The power of good software architecture The importance behind a simple, yet efficient design. In the chapter 14 of his book "Code Craft", author and developer Peter GoodLiffe talks about the importance and influence of good software designing. I found it quite practical (and a little unconventional) how he describes the different styles of architecture in software through comparisons with pasta. I was so hungry yet intrigued while reading through the descriptions of each type and the different applications each have for different situations. I always find it overwhelming how easy it can seem to make a good base to develop software, and yet there are so many sources and lectures on how to get it right, as it is clearly underestimated how challenging it can result to make not only a functional software, but flexible, modular, esthetic, and reliable. And the most difficult thing of all is that there are NO right answers. There are NO instructions or guides on how to b...
Read more

Understanding the SOLID Principles

Understanding the SOLID Principles In a section on the book “Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success”, Edward Guiness talks about a set of practices to have simple and efficient code: The SOLID Principles. The acronym stands for:  Single Responsibility Principle Open/Closed Principle Liskov Substitution Principle Interface Segregation Principle Dependency Inversion Principle The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) states that each class should have one and exactly one responsibility. Only experience and practice will help you determine what one responsibility envolves, The Open/Closed Principle (OCP) says that each class should be open for extension, but closed for modification. When adding new behavior, we should leave the base class alone and instead create new inheriting classes, and avoid unexpected consequences for the original subclasses. The Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) says that the less inheritance we h...
Read more