Design Thoughts

I was going through some older books that I had stored away, and came across the book, Change By Design, by Tim Brown. The book was published in 2009 and is not particularly earth shattering or deeply enlightening. But, it does contain some nuggets that resonated with me (especially watching less-experienced software engineers try to design a complex system, or (even harder) a good, domain ontology that is somewhat future proof).

There is a valuable quote from the book ...

Design thinking … [matches] human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business.

Seems obvious, right? But there is really much more to this statement than is understood with a cursory reading.

When designing a solution, you have to start with the needs and requirements of your customers (and they are not always realistic). Then, you have your available technologies ... maybe OWL/RDF and triple stores, maybe natural language parsers and libraries, maybe good insights from design patterns that can be reused. Lastly, you have constraints - be they time, money, lack of experienced personnel or any number of other things.

Too often, I see a team focus on what they know, and design some amazing aspect of a project ... but NOT what the customer needs. So, you end up with a partial solution that disappoints your customer, but you are proud of what you accomplished. Then, you decide that the customer or user is unreasonable. I have seen this happen a lot.

So, here are some words of advice ...

• Design the best solution that you can, taking everything into account and being honest where you are stretching beyond your comfort zones.
• Always strive to do incremental development and prototyping.
• Don't be afraid to fail and don't sacrifice the overall design to 1) make everything perfect or 2) focus on what you know. If you do the former, you will never deliver anything. If you do the latter, you will never be able to implement the big picture, because you are ignoring it. Also, you will surprise the customer because you are thinking that you have everything covered, when really, you only have a small aspect of the complete solution covered.

Also, remember that incremental development is just that ... incremental ... nothing in software is ever really perfect or complete. It really comes down to whether it works and whether the customer is happy.

P.S. I have only touched on a few of the points in the Change by Design book. There are lots of good summaries out on the web. One example is the page from the Idea Code Team.

Andrea