Agile Attitudes- Agile Attitudes - Design or Chaos?
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert
vanschoo at rcn.com
Fri Jul 9 19:33:57 EDT 2004
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Agile Attitudes
Volume 1, Issue 3 May 28, 2004
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Nancy V. and Ron Morsicato will be speaking at the Agile Development
Conference, XP Agile Universe Conference, and Embedded Systems Con-
ference. See below for details.
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Design or Chaos?
by Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Ron Morsicato
How does a manager know that design is happening? If your organization
has design documents, how do you know the design is being followed? How
do you know whether it is a good design?
Many software managers believe that design won't occur unless they
force it to happen by insisting on the creation of an explicit design
document. This concept of a separate design phase followed by a build
phase comes from other professional fields. It works for bridge
building, house building, and in manufacturing of all kinds.
The notion of a designer creating a blueprint and then others using
that to build from is ingrained in the engineering field. Let's compare
circuit board design with software design. When an electrical engineer
creates a circuit design, they are using CAD software that simulates
the behavior of that circuit, giving instant feedback on the viability
of the design. When a software engineer designs software, what do they
use? Diagramming on paper with UML is common. There are proprietary
tools that will simulate or generate code. These can be useful if the
development environment is suited to the tool. Feedback on the validity
of a software design is vital, but we're a long way from having
reliable, affordable tools to do this in all the environments where
software is developed. Paper-based diagrams are useful but limited.
The Agile software development movement has already addressed this
issue by integrating design with coding. The reason is simple: em-
ployment of a test-centric philosophy ensures that design decisions
are continuously being validated by test. Thus the design activity
itself is deeply immersed in code writing, and the output of the
activity (of designing by writing code that verifies the design) is
the operational code itself.
So if you want to verify whether your team is designing, it's better
to base the conclusion on how the team is verifying design than how
the team is documenting design. If they're verifying design by testing,
the question goes from "Do you design?" to "How well do you design?"
Which would you rather they answer?
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Public Appearances
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert will be presenting a paper "Taming the
Embedded Tiger: Agile Test Techniques for Embedded Software"
at the Agile Development Conference in Salt Lake City, June
22 - 26, 2004. See
http://www.agiledevelopmentconference.com/schedule/expreports.html
Ron Morsicato and Nancy V. will speak at XP/Agile Universe Conference
in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; August 15 - 18, 2004
Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Software Development. See
http://www.agileuniverse.com/schedule/index
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert will present on "Embedded Extreme Programming
Experience Report and Clinic" in Boston, September 13 - 16, 2004
See http://www.esconline.com/boston/
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