Is design dead?

Hello, I will give my opinion about the article “Is Design Dead?", by Martin Fowler, the main topic of the article is to define if software design is dead and this is because we have these agile methods like Extreme programming that most of the developers think that these agile methods are causing the beginning of the end of good software design but it is not.

What is Extreme programming (XP)?

This is an agile method to develop software, this means that it accelerates the process of developing of software, the main rule of extreme programming is communication, so in this agile method, the team of developers and the customer are working together in order to develop the software, so XP in its pure form has a customer (a business decision maker who knows what is needed and can decide priorities) who is “on site” with the team, but it has a cost, documentation is not the priority because it is an agile method to accelerate the process of developing, so I think that you have already noticed the problem, this represents that if you are only focused to finish the software that you are developing and you are not paying a lot of your attention to the design of your product, then it will be too complex in order to evolve this software in the future, if you remember my last post, software is not limited by physics, like buildings are. It is limited by imagination, by design, by the organization as the author said in his article "Who needs an Architect".

Is design dead?

Challenges are appearing every day and software is made to solve these problems, as I said, many people use agile methods in order to develop software fast, in order to prove this argument.

So in order to confront this reality, I think that everyone needs to consider design when they are using agile methods, even I used agile methods for some academic projects but this does not mean that if I am using an agile method I do not need to take care of design and architecture, in fact, I always consider design in this process (even if it takes more time), As I have been saying in my last posts of this blog, software design and architecture needs to be simple, I think that design is not dead and this is because it has been more frequent that software needs to evolve in order to confront the problems that the society has and in consequence, more people are needed to evolve and maintain software, so design needs to be the most simple possible in order to get someone who can understand these systems that someone else did and in consequence, he can develop greater things when he understands these systems, for me, design is not dead, for others, design can be dead, but it is because we don't have a real metric about what a good design and architecture of a software is, Martin Fowler said in his article "Who needs an architect" that architecture is about the important stuff and this abstract concept appears again in this article, so design can be dead or not, I think that the real answer to this question is the thinking of each individual have.