Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development (Rough Cut)

Description

This is a working draft of a pre-release book. It is available before the published date as part of the Rough Cuts service.

For software to consistently deliver promised results, software development must mature into a true profession. Emergent Design points the way. As software continues to evolve and mature, software development processes become more complicated, relying on a variety of methodologies and approaches. This book illuminates the path to building the next generation of software. Author Scott L. Bain integrates the best of today’s most important development disciplines into a unified, streamlined, realistic, and fully actionable approach to developing software. Drawing on patterns, refactoring, and test-driven development, Bain offers a blueprint for moving efficiently through the entire software lifecycle, smoothly managing change, and consistently delivering systems that are robust, reliable, and cost-effective.

Reflecting a deep understanding of the natural flow of system development, Emergent Design helps developers work with the flow, instead of against it. Bain introduces the principles and practices of emergent design one step at a time, showing how to promote the natural evolution of software systems over time, making systems work better and provide greater value. To illuminate his approach, Bain presents code examples wherever necessary and concludes with a complete project case study.

This book provides developers, project leads, and testers powerful new ways to collaborate, achieve immediate goals, and build systems that improve in quality with each iteration.

Coverage includes 

• How to design software in a more natural, evolutionary, and professional way
• How to use the “open-closed” principle to mitigate risks and eliminate waste
• How and when to test your design throughout the development process
• How to translate design principles into practices that actually lead to better code
• How to determine how much design is enough
• How refactoring can help you reduce over-design and manage change more effectively

The book’s companion Web site, www.netobjectives.com/resources, provides updates, links to related materials, and support for discussions of the book’s content.

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Series Foreword xvii

Chapter 1: Software as a Profession 1

How Long Have Human Beings Been Making Software? 1

What Sort of Activity Is Software Development? 2

What Is Missing? 6

Who Is Responsible? 8

Uniqueness 9

Patterns and Professionalism in Software Development 11

Andrea’s Closet 12

Off to the Moon 18

The Value of Patterns 26

Summary 27

We Fail Too Much 30

Definitions of Success 31

The Standish Group 32

Doing the Wrong Things 34

Doing the Things Wrong 35

Time Goes By, Things Improve 38

One Reason: The Civil Engineering Analogy 38

Giving Up Hope 41

Ignoring Your Mother 42

Bridges Are Hard, Software Is Soft 43

We Swim in an Ocean of Change 43

Accept Change 44

Embrace Change 45

Capitalize on Change 46

A Better Analogy: Evolving Systems 49

Summary 52

Chapter 4: Evolution in Code: Stage 1 55

Procedural Logic Replaced with Object Structure 56

The Origins of Object Orientations and Patterns 56

An Example: Simple Conditionals and the Proxy Pattern 58

The Next Step: Either This or That 62

Why Bother? 65

One Among Many66

Summary 67

Design from Context: More Carpentry from Scott 70

Patterns Lead to Another Cognitive Perspective 79

Patterns Help Give Us a Language for Discussing Design 79

Patterns in This Book 80

Summary 81

Elements of the Profession 83

A Visual Representation 85

Summary 86

Encapsulation 91

Cohesion 91

Coupling 99

Redundancy 106

Testability 112

Readability 114

Pathologies 114

Summary 119