jleyva in Métricas Web continues his series of articles on extreme programming, In this post he talks about design.
The author of Retrato en Sepia writes on the controversy about Jorge Cortell, a lecturer in the Spanish University who was going to demonstrate the downloading of material from a P2P network at a conference on intellectual property. His university stopped him and he has subsequently shot to fame as a defender of free speech. The author has been looking at the curriculum of Jorge Cortell that is published on the web site and concludes that we need a different type of person to defend users of P2P networks from the SGAE, the General society of Authors and Editors (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores).
Cesar Tardaguila in design-nation posts a link to the FAQ released by Microsoft ( Windows Mobile Platform Migration FAQ for Developers ) to help developers migrate applications to Windows Mobile version 5.
jleyva in Métricas Web posts a link to the FAQ about the technical aspects of Harmony that is part of the Apache organization.
jbravo in Programando... posts a link to this article by Roberto Canales Mora from the web site, Adicted to Work (Adictos al Trabajo). He also recommends the tutorials on the site.
José Luis Sánchez Navarro in avemundi met the infamous Jorge Cortell in person and was not particularly impressed. José Luis is a micro ISV (a producer of software) and depends on license fees for his livelihood. He is also not in favor of the SGAE whose stance in Spain against sharing on P2P networks has bordered on the draconian. The conclusion of the article is that people should not be opening their mouths to demand rights for themselves without thinking about the rights of others.
[My own opinion about sharing is that lots of people like to see or try out something before they buy and P2P networks allow one to do this very conveniently. When someone has decided to use what they have seen or tried, it is then that they decide to pay. The problem is creating a mechanism that determines what to use means and how to enforce the payment by the few who will always try to get something for nothing. If the creators don't want people to see or try what they have created, there are ways in which their wishes can be met.]
Juan Palacio in Navegapolis writes that design is a mental activity and the artifacts that are used to create or record the design are not the design itself. So while Quality Assurance can specify how the design is documented and how it should be approved, this process cannot guarantee the quality of the design itself. Determining whether a design is good is an activity to be performed by intuition and expert judgment and is like the idea of "smell" as proposed by Robert C. Martin in his book Agile Software Development. Here is my attempt at interpreting Juan's conclusion:
- design is the strategy of the solution
- the work of coding, integration and maintenance are the tactics
- the design should meet the needs of the users (requirements and level of quality)
- design does not emerge from processes, tools or modeling languages
- design emerges from the talent of the creator
- processes, tools and modeling languages are useful for breaking down complexity and for communicating the design to others
- the skills of some professionals allows them to handle high levels of complexity without needing to resort to processes, tools and modeling languages
- it is possible to see the design and architecture of a system in the code
- the documentation of code is useful to communicate the design through space, where there are many developers, and through time to assist in its maintenance
- when using documentation to communicate the design it is necessary to work with processes that guarantee the integrity and currency of the documentation while it is changing
- design is not finished until it is fixed in code
- design can fail as easily in its strategy as through errors introduced in coding, integration and maintenance.
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