Your Design Maps

From the "better late than never" department, I present your design maps. To refresh your memory, a design map is a conversational tool for discussing your approach to design. See my call for design maps for details.

Anssi Piirainen writes from Finland:

Just read your blog entry about design maps and decided to have a chat in our team about the way we do it. You are right that the map provided a good frame for our discussion! This is the result:

Up-FrontIntermittentContinuous
Product P - -
Package - r r
Class - r R
Method - - R

We immediately realized that we should do more Product and Package level design. We are maintain a product and adding features to it all the time but we don't spend enough time thinking about the package structure for example. We should reflectively improve it all the time. We thought about starting regular technical meetings where we look at the current state of the code-base and design and figure out possible improvements into it.

I love how Anssi's discussion of design maps sparked ideas about ways to design better. That's everything I could hope for from this tool.

Terry Wray writes from Canada:

Read your blog on Design Maps. Here's mine. (It's eerily symmetrical!)

Up-FrontIntermittentContinuous
Product - p -
Package - p -
Class r r r
Method r R r

Steven Gordon writes from somewhere in cyberspace:

Up-FrontIntermittentContinuous
Product p R,p r
Package - r,p r
Class - r,p R
Method - r R

I am a pragmatic developer that uses as much of XP as is feasible in any given situation.

Dadi Ingolfsson writes from somewhere else in cyberspace:

Nice piece!

Here's my map:

Up-FrontIntermittentContinuous
Product - - r
Package p p r
Class p r R
Method p p R

And just for fun, here's mine again:

Up-FrontIntermittentContinuous
Product - R r
Package - R r
Class - r R
Method p - R

You can see from this design map that I'm heavily biased towards a reflective approach to design. Except for individual methods, I don't do any up-front design work. For "big-picture" design, I do most of my design at regular intervals; for detailed design, I do most of my design continuously.

Thank you all for your contributions! I think it's interesting that no two maps were the same--or even close. I'd love to keep this conversation going. If you have a blog, post your design map there and let me know (a trackback is good enough). If you don't have a blog, send me an email. Include some more information about how you design so we can understand the map better. I'll post another update in a month or so if I get enough responses.

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