Bryan Lawrence : Software Design, or, why Chandler is going nowhere

Bryan Lawrence

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Software Design, or, why Chandler is going nowhere

Joel has an interesting review of a book about the Chandler design and philosophy (I came across this via Joe Gregorio. The whole review is well worth a read, but I can't help wanting to quote these bits (sorry Joel, I know it's more than one paragraph, but I want to shout about these three over and over again, and I promise to attribute every time).

... you fell for that old overconfidence trick of your mind. "Oh, yeah, we totally know how to do this! It's all totally clear to us. No need to spec it out. Just write the code."

... you hired programmers before you designed the thing. Because the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team.

I can't tell you how many times I've been in a meeting with even one or two other programmers, trying to figure out how something should work, and we're just not getting anywhere. So I go off in my office and take out a piece of paper and figure it out. The very act of interacting with a second person was keeping me from concentrating enough to design the dang feature. What kills me is the teams who get into the bad habit of holding meetings every time they need to figure out how something is going to work. Did you ever try to write poetry in a committee meeting?

Mind you, I'm not convinced that diving off into an office to solve every problem is possible: despite the Mythical Man Month, sometimes you have to share tasks, and you just have to talk about them. What you do need at every technical meeting is some sort of straw man though!

(And I'm really sorry that Chandler appears to be going nowhere. I want a good mail/calendar/tasks application, and Outlook just doesn't deliver ... and nor does anything else I've tried, albeit all of the ones I've tried may have been hamstrung by having to interoperate with Exchange.)

Categories: computing

This page last modified Thursday 25 January, 2007
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