Presentation: What Drives Design?

by Abel Avram on Jan 25, 2009 |

In this presentation held during OOPSLA 2008, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock reviews various forms of driven development in order to understand the principles and values of several design practices used today. By comparing them, a designer will get a broader view over design and will better understand which design practice is more appropriate for him.

Watch: What Drives Design? (1h 18 min.)

Rebecca reviews several design practices including:

  • Responsibility-Driven Design
  • Test-Driven Development
  • Behavior Driven Development
  • Contract-Driven Development AKA Design by Contract™
  • Agile Model-Driven Development
  • Feature Driven Development
  • Model-Driven Development™
  • Model-Driven Engineering

Rebecca explains how some design practices came into being, how they have been used over the years and what are the values associated with using them. She also compares some design practices like in this example:

Data-Driven Design Responsibility-Driven Design
Centralized control Delegated control
Controllers Coordinators
Inherited attributes Inherited behavior
Many low-level messages Fewer, higher-level messages
Lots of simplistic information holders A few smart objects that blend role stereotypes

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Community comments

Requirements? by Mileta Cekovic

Funny, I thought that requirements are the main driving force for the design.
Author made me fill like I was blind all these years...

Kidding aside, all these forces author mentions are secondary forces, while requirements should be the primary and the commanding force.

Re: Requirements? by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Of course requirements drive design, but in this talk I wanted to explore the values and practices that various "driven" methods have, their roots, and what they share in common and where they conflict.

It is all too simple to say "requirements drive design" and be done with it. What I am constantly amazed at are the myriad different ways people tackle software problems and all those subtle choices they make when crafting their solutions. I think it is good to reflect from time to time on why we do software design the way we do as well as what we personally value. I've just written a blog posting that might spur some discussion on this. www.wirfs-brock.com/2009/01/what-drives-design....

Re: Requirements? by Ricardo Limon

Curious thing that organizations sometimes missuse the word requirement, making it very difficult to understand the real needs. I have come across too many self acclaimed System Architects that "drive design" by requirement.

Design principles by Anders Sjöberg

From Rebeccas blog; "But what then drives the way you approach your work?"

To me it is about implementing the design principles that Robert C Martin writes about in this article; www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Princip... . As he writes in the article I think it will help me create something which is "...flexible, robust, reusable, and developable.".

Is it a common and clear goal for all of the the design drivers to implement those principles?

Re: Design principles by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

I think that most of the people who have advocated xDD approaches and even talk about use of patterns or refactoring techniques are all trying to get at SOLID (or solid) design. They just have different emphasis and also a slightly different set of values. For example, Domain Driven Design from Eric Evans talks a lot about capturing the "ubiquitous" language of the domain and representing it in domain objects. While Robert Martin's principles lead you more towards well-structured organizations of objects and good use of inheritance and interfaces.

Most designers and design approaches I know wouldn't argue much w/ Martin's principles.

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