Entry 4, Day 6

A lot of work in documentation and social media department. I’ve split the About page into three separate ones and add some content to them, and organize widgets..

But lets get back to the project.

We are going to talk a little about general approach to writing software. There are two basic ideas you can follow:

Big Design Up Front – Spent a lot of time gathering requirements for the entire application, carefully plan the architecture amongst white-bearded gang of architect, proceed to code and then test the application. At the end most of the requirements will be outdated since Client will figure out that he wanted something entirely else. Or go bankrupt in the middle of entire process. You are left with beautifully designed and mostly useless software.

Emergent Design – Also known by some coder as Pile of garbage. Actually this is the case if you do it wrong, because emergent design does not mean that we add and add and add new features without any clue or second thoughts. We add new features incrementally within some short periods of time like two weeks (called Sprints). We land with with business value, and working software, go to the Client and ask, “is this what you wanted?”. If it wasn’t, we have two wasted weeks worst case and a lot of experience. However if the Client is happy, we get back to keyboards, seek for common points and patterns and refactor to shape the application structure. We can do that safely, because we have a suite of automatic tests that will protect us from bugs, do we?

Actually, the way to go depends a bit on situation. Some projects may have a very strict and stable requirements, and it might be efficient to use BDUF at the end. But I thing those are in minority. Most of the time you don’t know what will happen in the future. If you do however have a good vision of how the application will look like, It might help you make better choices and plan a bit in advance, saving here and there. Not an easy task, but who said that software development is easy?

I will go with almost pure Emergent Design, and hope it will not turn into, well.. you know.