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Design as Choice: Eugene Wallingford

Knowing and Doing: Design as Choice.  Eugene Wallingford has an interesting riff on what design is and the ways that design emerge and the tension between design as specified and design as discovered.  It reminds me that at one point I responded to an interview “why do I need an architect?” question with “to keep your options open.”

{tags: Eugene Wallingford TROST orcmid Visual Studio Express Edition platform independence platform isolation software architecture}

I am engaging in a toy illustrative design/programming exercise that demonstrates how we can establish portable arrangements for what must have platform-specific implementation: isolating platform dependencies in a way which minimizes the dependency surface and has the dependency be maintainable in the face of multi-platform migration.  What's particularly revealing to me is how this tiny worked case is revealing to me how much my design sensibilities have matured certain respects without having paid direct attention to it.  I am also learning about the difficulty of edge cases and proper testing for the case that I chose to illustrate.

I think the tension between specification, exploration, and discovery/refinement has to do with designing on purpose.  That is, having it be “by design.”   It is the case that all artifacts, especially software ones, exhibit architectures.  The goal is to accomplish an architecture or design on purpose rather than by accident.  There is something to be gained by having enough (but no more) up front, especially with regard to the embodiment of essential requirements and to the identification of the invariant parts that one is committed to preserving in the face of and in spite of whatever else happens.  One might learn that original design points cannot be satisfied or preserved, and that is also something to address explicitly when it occurs.

Although, even in my simple example, I am discovering a great many aspects of the problem that I did not appreciate when starting out, despite the fact that I did specify my approach in advance and I have not provided much confirmative program code so far, I don’t think I would have noticed so much in my explorations if I had not started with a trial specification which is still being refined as I work out the demonstration.

posted by orcmid at 8/03/2006 11:09:02 AM, rating data by NewsGator Online