Managing the Risks of Designing for Change
by Steve McConnell
Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
- Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
- Preface
- I. EFFICIENT DEVELOPMENT
- 1. Welcome to Rapid Development
- 2. Rapid-Development Strategy
- 3. Classic Mistakes
- 4. Software-Development Fundamentals
- 5. Risk Management
- II. RAPID DEVELOPMENT
- 6. Core Issues in Rapid Development
- 7. Lifecycle Planning
- 8. Estimation
- The Software-Estimation Story
- Estimation-Process Overview
- Size Estimation
- Effort Estimation
- Schedule Estimation
- Estimate Refinement
- Further Reading
- 9. Scheduling
- 10. Customer-Oriented Development
- 11. Motivation
- 12. Teamwork
- Software Uses of Teamwork
- Teamwork's Importance to Rapid Development
- Creating a High-Performance Team
- Shared, Elevating Vision or Goal
- Sense of Team Identity
- Results-Driven Structure
- Competent Team Members
- Commitment to the Team
- Mutual Trust
- Interdependence Among Members
- Effective Communication
- Sense of Autonomy
- Sense of Empowerment
- Small Team Size
- High Level of Enjoyment
- How to Manage a High-Performance Team
- Why Teams Fail
- Long-Term Teambuilding
- Summary of Teamwork Guidelines
- Further Reading
- 13. Team Structure
- 14. Feature-Set Control
- 15. Productivity Tools
- 16. Project Recovery
- III. BEST PRACTICES
- Introduction to Best Practices
- 17. Change Board
- 18. Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Using the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Managing the Risks of the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Side Effects of the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- The Daily Build and Smoke Test's Interactions with Other Practices
- The Bottom Line on the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Keys to Success in Using the Daily Build and Smoke Test
- Further Reading
- 19. Designing for Change
- 20. Evolutionary Delivery
- 21. Evolutionary Prototyping
- 22. Goal Setting
- 23. Inspections
- 24. Joint Application Development (JAD)
- 25. Lifecycle Model Selection
- 26. Measurement
- 27. Miniature Milestones
- 28. Outsourcing
- 29. Principled Negotiation
- 30. Productivity Environments
- 31. Rapid-Development Languages (RDLs)
- 32. Requirements Scrubbing
- 33. Reuse
- 34. Signing Up
- 35. Spiral Lifecycle Model
- 36. Staged Delivery
- 37. Theory-W Management
- 38. Throwaway Prototyping
- 39. Timebox Development
- 40. Tools Group
- 41. Top-10 Risks List
- 42. User-Interface Prototyping
- Using User-Interface Prototyping
- Managing the Risks of User-Interface Prototyping
- Side Effects of User-Interface Prototyping
- User-Interface Prototyping's Interactions with Other Practices
- The Bottom Line on User-Interface Prototyping
- Keys to Success in Using User-Interface Prototyping
- Further Reading
- 43. Voluntary Overtime
- A. Bibliography
- Index
Using the best practice of Designing for Change poses no risks to the rest of the project. The main risk associated with Designing for Change is simply the risk of failing to use the practice to its full benefit.
Overreliance on languages and pictures rather than on design.The mere act of putting objects into classes does not create an object-oriented design, does not provide information hiding, and does not protect a program from changes. The mere act of drawing a module-hierarchy chart does not create a change-tolerant design. Good designs come from good design work, not from pictures of design.
Doing object-oriented design effectively is harder than people have made it out to be. As discussed in Silver-Bullet Syndrome, it is an expert's technology. David Parnas writes that object-oriented (O-O) programming has caught on slowly for the following reason:
CROSS-REFERENCE
For another broad view of object-oriented technology, see Identifying Silver Bullets in Silver-Bullet Syndrome.
[O-O] has been tied to a variety of complex languages. Instead of teaching people that O-O is a type of design, and giving them design principles, people have been taught that O-O is the use of a particular tool. We can write good or bad programs with any tool. Unless we teach people how to design, the languages matter very little. The result is that people do bad designs with these languages and get very little value from them. (Parnas in Brooks 1995)
To design for change, you must actually design. Focusing on areas that are likely to change, information hiding, and families of programs make up the strategic backbone of object-oriented design. If you don't follow those design steps, you might as well be working in Fortran, plain old C, or assembler.
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