Bulldozer00's Blog

I’m not a fan of “emergent global architecture“, but I AM a fan of “emergent local design“. To mitigate downstream technical and financial risk, I believe that one has to generate and formally document an architecture at a high level of abstraction before starting to write code. To do otherwise would be irresponsible.

The figure below shows a portion of an initial “local” design that I plucked out of a more “global” architectural design. When I started coding and unit testing the cluster of classes in the snippet, I “discovered” that the structure wasn’t going work out. The API of the architectural framework within which the class cluster runs wouldn’t allow it to work without some major, internal, restructuring and retesting of the framework itself.

After wrestling with the dilemma for a bit, the following workable local design emerged out of the learning acquired via several wretched attempts to make the original design work. Of course, I had to throw away a bunch of previously written skeletal product and test code, but that’s life. Now I’m back on track and moving forward again. W00t!