Friday, July 03, 2009

The Problem with Big Design Up Front is the "Big" not the "Up Front"

The risks of Big Design Up Front isn't the "Up Front" part, it's the "Big" part. Doing too much design without validating it inevitably drives a good bit of the productivity loss that continues to hamper software projects.

It's an issue of large batch sizes - the "Big" in "Big Design Up Front". The larger batch sizes mean that we're always building today's software on yesterday's work and yesterday's decisions before proving that yesterday's work and decisions are sound. The larger the batch size, the larger the risk that the incorrectness of design will lead to ever more expensive countermeasures. And in many cases, design flaws are too subtle to be seen immediately, and collect negative potential energy in the form of on-going degradation in productivity that come to be seen as "normal".

Big Design Up Front has often come to be interpreted as "No Design Up Front", and has led to a lot of mediocrity in design by inappropriately democratizing the responsibility for design quality. This is often done in the name of cross-training, but the best way to teach potential software designers to be good software designers is to constantly expose them to good software design, rather than the mediocre design that can come from a misinterpretation of Big Design Up Front.




Ampersand GT

Working with software developers and organizations to help realize the potential of software product development through higher productivity, higher quality, and improved customer experience

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