Is Design Dead?

I found the article called “¿Design Dead? “by Martin Fowler quite disruptive. Anyone could think that someone who has studied and written about UML or other tools for software design, would defend it until death. But Martin Fowler does not do this but talks about a big change in software design.

What seems to me very successful on the part of the author, is that it makes clear that in fact the design is not something obsolete, but that the form and bottom in which it is realized has evolved. I think that having a design created by the typical software architect who is not interested in the process is often misleading and ends up being worse than not having an initial design.

I agree that the ideas of Xtreme Programming are very efficient when applied correctly. Since, even if you do not have a defined design, you have good practices that allow you to implicitly have a structure, which translates into a design.

I also agree that the evolutionary design ends up not being a good way to make designs since each modification is ad-hoc to the problem of a specific moment and that deteriorates the overall design and therefore, it ends up being very difficult to apply changes in the future. On the other hand, Fowler talks about the disadvantages of a planned design, he tells us that programmers end up modifying the design because the architect cannot attend to the inevitable deficiencies of his own design.

In the end, what I found most interesting is that XP defends the evolutionary design but does it in such a way that it is cheap to make the changes. By maintaining simplicity as part of the XP process, it makes it easier for developers to make changes and therefore is achieved cheapier. It is for the above, that it could be said that more than having a good design, what makes things stay simple are good programming practices.