Sessions at Software Architect 2011 about Test Driven Development on Wednesday 19th October

TDD seems to take all the credit for getting software designed right these days. But how do you approach a User Story or a whole application with TDD? Use UML? Right – except hardly anybody does. So let’s get real: whoever said object orientation would make designing software easy, was wrong. OOAD, UML, even Clean Code are not easy, not even intuitive. Enter flow-orientation. If you temporarily give up any fixation on “real” objects there is a way to escape many design difficulties. Want a design that is easily readable? Want a design method that lends itself to teamwork? Want a design method that can describe software on any number of abstraction levels – and can easily and losslessly be translated into code? Want designs that result in code that can be tested without mock-ups? Flow-oriented designs promise to give you this and more. It’s designing software the smart way; it brings out the best in groups. And there is still a place for “real” objects. Promised.

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don’t yet know what you don’t know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualisations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilising them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping your code in sync with the problem domain.