The Design of Design 73
asgard4 writes "Coming up with sound, elegant, and easy to implement designs is not a trivial matter, as Fred Brooks, author of the classic book The Mythical Man-Month, acknowledges in his latest book The Design of Design. In many disciplines — especially in software development — the design process and how to produce good designs is relatively poorly understood. Teaching the design process to students is even more difficult. In the form of opinionated essays, Brooks attempts to summarize what we know about the design process, how it has changed over time, and how we can produce better and more elegant designs. Brooks has decades of experience designing large systems and is well known for his involvement in the design of IBM's OS/360. Even though Brooks is a computer scientist, the book applies equally well to many other disciplines outside of software development that have a formal design process, such as architecture. A lot of his examples come from other engineering disciplines and architecture. But of course he presents the obligatory OS/360 case study as well." Read on for the rest of Martin's review.
The book is divided into six parts, the first three of which I consider the most relevant and most interesting. In part one, Brooks starts out with a discussion of models for the design process. In particular, he presents his take on how the traditional Rational Model (or the Waterfall Model — its offspring that is better known to computer scientists) is not sufficient to achieve greatness in design because it has a too simplistic and idealistic view of the design process. Brooks then proceeds to discuss better, more iterative models for designing, for example, Boehm's Spiral Model used in software development, which much of the newer so-called agile methodologies are based on. He argues that it is important to have a clear, concise model that can be accompanied by an easy to understand graphical representation, such as a diagram, in order to be able to teach the design process to novice designers.| The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist | |
| author | Frederic P. Brooks, Jr. |
| pages | 432 |
| publisher | Pearson Education |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Martin Ecker |
| ISBN | 0201362988 |
| summary | Inspiring new book by Fred Brooks |
Part two of the book is about collaboration and team design. On large projects there will usually be multiple designers who are forced to work together to produce a single, coherent design. The major stumbling block in team design is achieving conceptual integrity. Brooks suggests that the most important way of achieving this is by empowering a single software architect who has a high-level overview and can make the final call on different, competing design alternatives. I totally agree with this from my own experience of working on large projects where multiple people held design responsibilities. In this part of the book, the author also has a timely chapter on telecollaboration and on the impact of modern technologies, such as videoconferencing via the internet, on team design.
Part three, titled Design Principles, contains various essays on budgeting, constraints, and user involvement in the design process. There is also some interesting material on what Brooks calls exemplars in design, i.e. the reuse of previous designs as a whole or in part in creating new designs. My favorite chapter in this section of the book is the one on good style. I find that a good design doesn't just need to be coherent and functional, it also needs to be elegant. Brooks's definition of design style is quite good in my opinion: "Style is a set of different repeated microdecisions, each made the same way whenever it arises, even though the context may be different". Well put.
Part four of the book, in which the author outlines his dream software system for designing houses, is the by far weakest part of the book for me. The presented "design" of the dream system is simply a list of high-level features without going into any detail, which is pretty pointless in my opinion. Part five gets more interesting again with two essays on great designers and how to foster an environment at a company to make designers great. In particular, I like the idea of having designers "eat their own dog food", i.e. forcing them to use the end products of their designs out in the wild (maybe in form of a sabbatical at one of the system's customers). The book concludes with seven chapters on various case studies. While these are certainly interesting, they don't contain any additional essential thoughts on the design process that weren't already presented in the previous parts of the book.
The Design of Design is an excellent book from one of the pioneers in computer science. Brooks's writing style is as elegant and enjoyable as ever. While he dates himself in some of his examples, the overarching ideas of the book are timeless and important. Not many books have been written about the design of the design process itself and this book is a valuable addition. It is mostly aimed at designers and people who have spent some time reflecting on the design process itself. The casual reader and people who are more concerned with implementing designs rather than creating the designs themselves might find it somewhat intangible. However, even designers in disciplines other than computer science or software development can gain a lot from the insights in this book.
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Systems of Systems (Score:3, Interesting)
Great, SoS was the last big buzzword around corporations who wanted to charge the government a lot for doing LSI (large scale integration).
On the bright side, "DoD" is already taken in the military-industrial complex, so hopefully this won't catch on.
insert "yo dawg" reference here:
Unfortunately this aint taught in school.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unfortunately this aint taught in school.. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a mechanical engineer we had a quite a few courses related to design.
One course was dedicated solely on the design process itself in a general sense.
Another class dealt with the machine design process.
Another dealt with the design process for thermal and fluid systems.
Our final year course was a one year long design class where we were expected to iterate through our design multiple times and implement it.
"Talent," you say... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not some mythical "gift" that people either have or don't. It is a finely honed skill of combining creative thinking with pragmatic analysis and predicting what will happen in the future of the design process and product lifespan. The people who have "talent" are the ones who have nurtured their creativity and had lots of experience (often in unexpected places) that lets them anticipate what will be needed and how it will be used.
It's true that you can't "teach" it the way you teach someone arithmetic, but you can encourage the development of certain mental processes by providing the right environment, examples, and opportunities. But everyone develops differently, not everyone grows to college age with the same amount of creativity and pragmatism, and not everyone is even able to learn it until later in life. Thus, some people are better designers than others, and hopefully they will end up making more money for it. But that's not to say we can't increase the average design aptitude of the population through concerted effort. They may not all be geniuses, but they may be able to spot a genius when they see one and pay attention to him.
You are onto something... (Score:2, Interesting)
A major component missing from engineering education - software or otherwise - is the design process. In retrospect, I think this is due to too many professors lacking real world experience outside academia. Basically most of them have never been involved in large, complicated projects. I don't know about everyone else's education, but in my school we had just one course devoted to the software engineering process and one course devoted to the electrical engineering process. In retrospect this lopsided mix of fundamentals and process is really at odds with how engineering really works.
Funny you mention that (and I agree with you in that a lot of professors lack experience in large, complex projects, in particular enterprisey ones.) A few days ago I was talking with some colleagues about the disconnect between CS, EE and CE as well as between CS and MIS (which can be almost fatal for young graduates working either in engineering or corporate projects.)
But, and more related to your point, I was wondering how great it would have been if I had been exposed not just to one undergrad software engineering course, but to several, or perhaps one software engineering course paired with a systems engineering course (perhaps using case studies of projects that had problems wrt to design and management.)
My own undergrad course in software engineering had me building a fairly non-trivial application using PowerBuilder with a team. It was a good exercise, but I would have preferred this experienced to have been followed by another undergrad course covering requirements elicitation and analysis, testing, project estimation, design trade-offs and software process management., perhaps by using case studies.
My two grad courses in software engineering were mostly learning how to architect systems in UML and case studies on formal methods. Those are fine, but still, the items listed above were missing. Those were equally valuable and I had to learn about them the hard way. Software engineering education cannot be complete until those topics are standard part of the curriculum at the undergrad level.