1: Design & Architecture

❔ What is design? What is architecture?

• There's been a lot of confusion over the years.

• There is no difference between them.

• "Architecture" is often used in the context of something at a high-level that is divorced from low-level details

• "Design" often implies structures and decisions at a lower level.

🏛️ One Whole

• Low-level details and the high-level structure are all part of the same whole.

• They form a continuous fabric that defines the shape of the system.

• Can't have one without the other.

• A continuum of decisions from the highest to the lowest point.

🥅 The Goal?

• Minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the system.

• Measure of design quality is the effort required to meet the needs of the customer.

  • Effort that stays low throughout the lifetime of the system is good design.

  • Effort that increases with each new release is bad design.

👎 What goes wrong?

• Analogy: The Tortoise vs. the Hare.

• Developers work hard, but the part of their brain that knows good, clean, well-design code matters is asleep.

🤥 The Familiar Lie: We can clean it up later

• We can clean it up later; we just have to get to market first.

• Things never get cleaned up later because market pressures never abate.

• The next feature must get done. The mess builds. Productivity declines.

🤥 The Bigger Lie: Clean code slows us down

• Writing messy code makes them go fast in the short term and slows them down in the long term.

• Fact: Making messes is always slower than staying clean.

Conclusion

• The best option for the development organization: Recognize its own overconfidence and take the quality of software architecture seriously.

• To take it seriously, you must know what it is.

• What attributes of software architecture lead to a system that will minimize effort and maximize productivity?