Re: Re Effectively building a complex object-oriented system WAS: Estimating Costs Up

Corey Burnett wrote:

> Good points.  I guess I think of a traditional construction metaphor
> (don't know if it is a proper metaphor or not).  Let's say that I am
> building a house.  I read all of my user stories up front and I know
> that it will be a three story house.  So I make some rough plans and
> estimates ahead of time and I feel pretty good because I have built
> homes before.

Software is weightless. Source code is the design, and one construction is a
compilation and test run.

To design a house, we build a hut, add a business requirement, build a
larger hut, add a requirement, and keep going until we have a skyscraper.

XPers fear BDUF for a simple reason. Exploring a design in code very often
leads rapidly to a surprisingly simple design that does not need rework.
Designing for extensibility, without code, often leads to a design burdened
with excessive speculative complexity.

Complexity is easy to add and hard to remove, so start with simplicity.

--
Phlip
http://industrialxp.org/community/b...tUserInterfaces