Design Patterns and Development Costs

Patterns are a way to communicate ideas between programmers. However, they will only be effective with an initial share understanding of the context in which they will be applied.

Not involvement in a code base will deteriorate our understanding of coding practices. If you stop coding, you stop learning. This happens regularly and is something we do only once and remember about. The code keeps evolving daily. Therefore we need to find ways to interact with it to learn and effectively apply patterns.

Software Design is constantly talking back. Friction should be the best driver to make improvements in a system. The program design talks back to developers whenever a change needs to be applied. If a plan is making things hard for the team, it’s talking. It’s telling you that there might be something important missing.

Many signs suggest that a design is rigid. The most practical and obvious is when there’s friction testing an object. When an object is hard to test, it is often a sign of coupling. We must be open to design insights during coding. The interaction between developers and the code is how the system becomes straightforward.

Patterns help with the reduction of development costs. Design matters when we need to make a change. It is a trade-off, a decision that developers make in the now to establish a better future. If there is one driving force behind these patterns, it is the reduction of the lifecycle costs of software. The main reason to apply Design and Design Patterns is to reduce the development cost.

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[¹]: Kent Beck (1997): (Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns: Beck, Kent: 9780134769042: Amazon.com: Books)