Design and Reality: Essays on Software Design - Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Mathias Verraes

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

This version was published on 2022-10-04

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Her research interests focus on the cognitive and social aspects of software development including: Naturalistic decision-making (NDM) and software architecture decisions; decision-making models for software architects; design heuristics and their relationships to software patterns, guidelines; values and practices for sustainable software architecture and its evolution; software design and development ethnography; practical software design methods; agile architecture and design practices; patterns and pattern languages; object-oriented design; software modeling; domain modeling; documenting complex software systems; and communicating design intentions

Design & Reality

There is a fallacy about how domain modelling works. The misconception is that we can design software by discovering all the relevant concepts in the domain

a simplistic perception of how design works: a linear path from A to B:

The Spotify Model

this model introduces elements not found in previous models we examined.

Roughly, the model consists of Squads (cross-functional autonomous teams that are responsible for a discrete part of the product, led by a triumvirate of a Product Owner, Tribe Lead, and Agile Coach), Tribes (for coordinating multiple Squads), a Tribe lead that coordinates with other Tribes, and Alliances (for collaboration across Tribes). Then you have Chapters (to deal with shared interests, such as standardisation and preferred practices in a field). Finally, a Guild is an ad hoc grouping of people interested in learning a specific topic.

Contrasting Spotify and Team Topologies

Team Topologies has no building blocks for any kind of group that spans people from different teams. Of course, a Team Topologies organisation could have such groups, but as a model it doesn’t tell us to have them, doesn’t tell us how to organise them, or even to recognize that such groups exist.