Design is Inevitable

 |  Niceties

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.

Douglas Martin, Book Design: A Practical Introduction (1990)

Good to remember when some tell you to skip software design, modeling. Good to assess how much of unconscious, accidental - bad 1 - design you would have in your digital product and if counteracting the consequences of that design is cheaper than do it right from the beginning 2.

Footnotes

  1. There exists infinitely more ways of getting things wrong than doing them right see ↩

  2. This is neither defies the incremental design nor dismissively assumes "big detailed design upfront" is the only approach. Fitst, professionally engineering code is welcoming changes; second, every Waterfall ill-used turns out to beast, as XP/Agile does. ↩