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InfoQ Homepage Presentations Modifiability: Or is there Design in Agility?

QCon New York (June 13-15): Learn best practices from senior developers at early adopter companies.

Modifiability: Or is there Design in Agility?

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58:21

Summary

Many people assume that agile methods mean an absence of design. Design still happens in agile projects, but it shifts from an up-front phase to a continual evolution. Design decisions should be left to the last responsible moment, but some design decisions do need to be made at the start of a project. Martin Fowler explores this topic through a panel discussion of design in an agile context.

Bio

Martin Fowler is a pioneer of object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, UML, and Extreme Programming - having written 5 books on some of these subjects. Martin's focus is in designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design.

About the conference

QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

Recorded at:

Oct 15, 2007

This content is in the Agile topic

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Community comments

  • A great Panel, I really enjoyed it!

    by Sadek Drobi,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I really enjoyed this Panel @ QCon london, I ve been waiting for this video for almost half a year now! Also another video i am expecting soon is the "The Yawning Crevasse of Doom" keynote with Fowler and North.

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  • Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Gurkan Nisanci,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    To watch them offline, is there a way to download the videos and presentations?

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Ole Friis,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Yeah, would be really nice. I always get problems watching videos on InfoQ, for some reason - the video "gets stuck" after 10 to 15 minutes of playing, and the only fix is to stop it, start from the beginning and drag the playback icon to the place it got stuck.

    Well, today this fix just doesn't work. Perhaps because I'm using Safari on a Mac? Anyway, this is too frustrating, so I give up... which is a shame, because the panel discussion seems really interesting, and I've enjoyed the 25 minutes I succeeded watching.

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Harald Walker,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Am missing that as well. Would like to share it with my team on a big screen.

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Floyd Marinescu,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Sorry guys, we are working on a new system that will make some of these problems go away, but it may not be up for another month or two. In the meantime there is now way to download these or go full screen. MP3 versions should be added later on as well.

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Jim Standley,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Yikes, this one ends in mid sentence? Bummer.

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Floyd Marinescu,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Sorry I meant that there is "no" way to download these or go full screen.

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Luc Prefontaine,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I have been creating custom software for 25 years and I now feel less
    lonely on Earth.

    Since I started to write software, I used to postpone decisions until time was up
    to address them, I used to design evolution capabilities in my design, I used to
    understand the business model and simulate processes to insure my software could bend
    to potentially new uses not in the immediate scope of the project at hand,...

    And I never has to use a book about design patterns to find the appropriate one...

    I never understood "architects" these days to spit out
    tons of papers describing the system down to the tiniest bolt before spitting out the
    first line of code. We have much more powerful tools now to refactor software than
    just a text editor, a compiler and a linker...

    To me it looks like bullshit to postpone the implementation as much as possible.
    It's code that makes a system run business processes, not the paper around it.

    I saw many "so called architects" adopt a rigid design from the start to end up failing at user acceptance
    tests, busting budgets, missing time to market deadlines, or ending up with a solution that is not flexible enough
    to adapt to new business needs. This happens too often to be anything else than
    a bad approach to creating software systems.

    These "so called architects" leave projects just before failure
    and propagate their bad practices elsewhere.

    It's about time that the industry rethinks it's approach to creating softwares.
    It looks to me that we went through a creativity drought for several years
    were software projects were assimilated to mechanicals processes that were to yield a
    working implementation. Experience in delivering projects from 0 to production is
    not recognized since the belief in these mechanical methods to deliver software is
    deeply anchored in the industry.

    Creativity and experience are essentials in a project. Since the parameters are never the same (time to market, budget, business domain, ...) there is no single recipe that can work for
    every project. Nonetheless that mirage of a bureaucratic process has been sought
    by the industry for years and I think it relegated creativity and experience to limbos.

    Hopefully, the wind will change sides...

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  • Re: Downloading videos&pres.?

    by Antony Stubbs,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Oh man! Just when he was about to talk about something i'm very interested in learning about - database schemas!! What's the story?? Can we get the rest of the presentation?

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  • Video doesn't even start...

    by Fred Janon,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    The Flash presentation gets stuck at "Initializing".

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  • Re: Video doesn't even start...

    by Justin Forder,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    For me it gets to a little after 46 minutes, then jumps to 0:00 (black screen with play button).

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  • Re: Video doesn't even start...

    by Justin Forder,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    After reloading the page it gets to 58:21 - the full length of the video, but not quite the end of the session.

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  • semantics

    by joshua milane,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    How is an insurance policy waste? I think semantics are getting people confused, or waste is not really waste, or people are choosing their words poorly.

    Josh

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