Well, don’t put all of your design off until the end but it can be helpful to leverage your design options so you don’t have to commit until later in the development cycle when you’ll know more.
Summary of Seven Strategies Series
I finished my “Seven Strategies” series of 72 blog posts with seven strategies for implementing each of the nine practices from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. These posts are filled with practical advice for implementing the nine core practices from Scrum, Extreme Programming, and …
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Read MorePractice Good Development Habits
As you can see from my last seven blog posts, doing emergent design is not for beginners. Doing emergent design is an advanced development practice. But it’s not enough to know about good development principles and practices. It’s not enough to know about design patterns. We have to use them. We have to apply them. …
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Read MoreBe Merciless
One of the most important characteristics that I find senior developers have is the ability to change their minds and let go of an existing design when it no longer serves its purpose. What I find time and time again is that developers become attached to the current design even in the face of changing …
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Read MoreFocus on Code Quality
I believe in the Agile Manifesto. I know most of the original authors and they know that I think they’re pretty cool. They got so much right in such a short amount of space and that’s very admirable. But there’s one thing that I think they kind of missed the mark on, so I’m going …
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Read MoreUnderstand Refactoring
Refactoring code is not just changing the design of code without changing its external behavior, it’s also doing it in small, safe steps that are repeatable. This is what elevates refactoring to a discipline that we can talk about and create best practices around rather than just willy-nilly ways of changing code. It was Martin …
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Read MoreUnderstand Test-Driven Development
Another important aspect of doing emergent design is doing it safely and that means doing it while code is under test. But not just any tests, we have to write behavioral tests that don’t break when we refactor our code to emerge our designs. These are precisely the kind of tests that I’ve been talking …
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Read MoreUnderstand Design Patterns
Doing emergent design is an advanced practice that requires knowledge of a great many skills. One key skill that all professional software developers should acquire as they journey towards mastery is a deep understanding of design patterns, both in concept and in terms of the 23 design patterns called out by the Gang of Four …
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Read MoreUnderstand Object-Oriented Design
The first “barrier to entry” for doing emergent design, an advanced developer practice for incrementally building software, is to understand object-oriented design and development. In theory, the object-oriented model should be easy to understand but I don’t often see it well-understood in industry. I’ve reviewed millions of lines of code from companies across a range …
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Read MoreWhy Practice Eight: Implement the Design Last
By now you’ve probably figured out that I am a weirdo and that I like doing things differently than other people. In fact, I am an advocate of doing things backward. But I’m not being random here. As it turns out, the way most people build software includes some of the worst inefficiencies that I …
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Read MoreChange Your Mind, Again
When I was a kid I was told that it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. For some people, though, changing your mind can be seen as wishy-washy. We like to stand by what we say. We like to be right. But giving yourself the freedom to change your mind is one of …
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Read MoreChange Your Mind
One characteristic I consistently see among outstanding software developers is that they’re not afraid to change their minds, to change their approach, or to change their designs. In Agile we start building right away before we have all the requirements nailed down and we let new requirements emerge as we’re building. To those unfamiliar with …
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