Design time


Here is the synopsis of ideas for the design phase of the project from “Dynamics of Software Development” book.
Getting the best ideas expressed and available for analysis is the hardest part of the design process.

Unity of purpose:
Having a theme for the product means that you eliminate or at least minimize orthogonal values. This reduction can be a painful process, and yes it involves risk. But once you decide what the theme is, you have to sacrifice other qualities that don’t support the theme. Even if they are qualities you cherish that are expressive of your fondest and longest help beliefs.Here the author is clearly indicating the need for the mainline customer scenarios. The need to understand these scenarios by the whole team is essential as the need for them comes in many many meetings during the course of the project.
examples
  • Bug triage.
How do you choose between fixing a bug and releasing your product?
  • Performance scenarios
  • What are the scenarios you need to optimize?
Minimize dependencies
The value of this comes only from experience. A cool new technology is coming out or another team in your company is developing. You cant wait to use in your project. Think again are you in complete control of the other technology, what if they have show stopper bugs, what if they get canned, what is their performance sucks, what if they change design significantly in the middle. Dependencies are always evil unless so scrutinizing them to the tiniest details is essential to the success.
A product that is not designed to ship on time.. wont, One that is .. probably wont. The latter is preferable to the former.

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