Business-Driven Design

Design should focus on flexibility over aesthetics. Premature decisions about application structure should be avoided. Decisions should be made based on business relevance. Good Design, not personal preference, should be used.

Object-Oriented Design aims to arrange dependencies to allow for easy future change. The critical thing here is experimentation. We don’t want to make a decision forced by the tools we are using or by external pressure. A system’s structure determines how easy it is to adapt the system to new requirements in the short and long term.

Most teams accept the suggestions provided by frameworks and other libraries. Yet, frameworks conventions are suggestions, not rules. How software is structured can impact our ability to adapt and evolve it, even in the short term. If your application is successful, you must change many of your decisions. Design matters because of the need for change. Object-Oriented Design code only matters once we vary the code base. Making a design more flexible than the immediate change requires a waste of valuable time and money for a business. Software exists to reduce business costs with automation. Design is the means that programmers use to balance experimentation and comprehension in the face of uncertainty.

[¹]: Practical Object-Oriented Design: An Agile Primer Using Ruby