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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Last updated 11 months ago

👎 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.