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Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 10:15am - 11:30am
Design & Code
BT2

Avoid Over Design and Under Design

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging conundrum. Too much design often results in excess complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in a poor architecture or insufficient system structures which require expensive rework and hurt more in the long run. How can we know the right balance of upfront design work and emerging design approaches? Al Shalloway shows how to use design patterns—coupled with agile’s attitude of “don’t build what you don’t need”—to guide your design efforts. The trick is to identify potential design alternatives, analyze how each may affect the system in the future, and then find the simplest approach for isolating those potential effects. Al describes the essence of emergent design—start with a simple design and let it evolve as the requirements evolve—and demonstrates how to refactor to achieve better designs, which really is quite different from refactoring bad code.

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

With more than forty years of experience, the founder and CEO of Net Objectives Al Shalloway is an industry thought leader in lean, SAFe, kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum, and agile design. Al helps companies transition enterprise-wide to lean and agile methods, and teaches courses in these areas—one of a handful of SAFe SPC trainers.

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