The Undesigned

In an interesting entry over at agile focus, we are given an idea of what the myth of the undesigned is all about. Well, in this context, it is all about undesigned software, of course. What this entry stresses is the fact that the act of software development is nothing but design and I would have to agree here. The main argument is that the philosophy of adding design to already-built software is fundamentally flawed. I would also agree here. This does however raise several questions as to what counts as already designed software (if you don't subscribe to the notion that all software is designed). For instance, in the context of implementation design, the actual code itself, it is very hard to add design to.

This, I think is what the author is stressing. An example of adding design to code might be cleaning up code that was previously sloppy. But is this really design that is being added to the code or simple rearrangement? I suppose some constraints must be imposed on this sort of cleaning up. This would simply be to ensure that code design doesn't take place while "cleaning up".

Not designed is indeed a bad design but designing nothing but code is also a bad design. Implementation is one thing but it is always best to keep the important, platform-independent, design out of the code and in a model of some form or another.