A good design should intend to guide implementation, not dictate it; and for good reason as, the dynamic nature of requirements and systems is often too complex to view for a technical design to be considered as anything more than a basic prescription intended to convey the basis for implementation. Yet far too often people seem to believe that once a detailed design has been completed and approved implementation should be a breeze; however, this is just not a very realistic expectation.

For instance, one of my core job responsibilities is to review technical design documents and provide feedback and direction. This is an iterative process which typically has between 1-3 iterations depending on the complexity of the system. Initially myself and an engineer are given requirements for review. He or she then begins an initial draft of the design and once completed passes it on to me for review. I then review the document and provide feedback where applicable, either via annotations to the document itself or by reviewing with the developer (which is by far my preferred process). Should modifications be required the developer will then make revisions as needed. This process is repeated (within practicality) until final design has been approved.

At first it may appear as if only a single design iteration and review would be needed, however more often than not, requirements may not be completely understood during the beginning stages of design, nor are they typically ever set in stone so it is very common that a design will need to change during the early stages of a project or even throughout the entire development stage. Once final design has been completed an engineer then begins implementing the design. Theoretically this may appear to be a quite simple process: create a great design which contains as much detail as possible, review it, make revisions and approve it, then just pass it off to any developer for implementation and that’s it, done, right? – wrong!

There are a number of problems to this approach. Below I have outlined the three I feel are most significant and the solutions I have found to address each.

Creativity

The first problem is that a design which goes into too much detail completely limits or even worse, kills creativity – which in my opinion is the single most important trait a developer can possess, especially when designing. The developer is now merely a typist and will undoubtedly become very bored when implementing the design, especially if it is not even his/her design to begin with! Because of this lack of creativity the final code will ultimately suffer and bugs can be expected. Keeping design on a higher level allows developers to have the creative freedom needed to provide quality implementations and work they can feel is their own.

Flexibility

The second problem is that the more detailed and precise the design the less flexibility there is when requirements change and modifications need to be made to the design and thus implementation. For example, if a design contains very low level details, such as method signatures and other implementation specific details the ability to change the design now becomes increasingly complex and will result in much of the design needing to be reworked significantly. In addition the more detail there is the harder it is to write unit tests against the design as the actual implementation has already been defined. Designs need to be very high level and should not go beyond identifying class names, their responsibilities, relationships and dependencies.

Tools

The third problem is that far too often developers get caught up in all the details of UML notation and related tools. Again, this negates creativity and results in the developer concentrating more on making the design look technically correct rather than concentrating on designing towards a great solution which addresses the problem at hand. In addition, this also results in unnecessary time being spent to complete the design – time which otherwise could have been much better spent on something that produces a better pay off for the project. Now this is not to say that UML shouldn’t be used, actually quite the contrary as I feel a final design should be in UML (or some other format) as a shared language is very helpful in allowing readers to easily understand the design. I always suggest a technique where developers draw out their design in any way that makes sense to them without having to give much thought to anything other than the solution itself. This could be anything from drawing / scribbling thoughts on a pad, to building out a vision from legos – seriously! Only once the design has been envisioned would I recommend bringing it to realization through the use of a formal design tool, such as Visio or other UML tools to be used.

The above illustrates the three most common design issues I have encountered, most of which pertain to over-detailed designs, as well as the approach I take to address each. If you have not encountered any of these issues in your own work than that is generally a good sign, however try to keep them in mind when designing as it will pay off in the end. The important thing to remember when designing is to design for flexibility and simplicity. Less is usually more and the KISS principle, especially when applied to software design, will always pay off in the end.