document driven design

The scourge of Document Driven Design

Documents, or rather words are the scourge of product design. Because words can never convey the true meaning or emotion of what is really required. All to often, software development projects are driven by the documentation – agile projects can be equally guilty of this- driven by words on paper (or card) that convey what the requirement is. Issue #1. Developers don’t read!

Except for a few exceptions, software is all about a user interacting with a system in order to accomplish a goal. Trying to describe that premise in terms of features and functionality is fundamentally flawed as it will be nested in the language of technical implementation, not in the user interaction. “Find” becomes “search”, “buy” becomes “shopping cart”, “check” becomes “validation” and so on. Issue #2. The desired outcomes become lost in a smog of technical jargon.

Solution: Picture Driven Design. Up front. Yeah! I’m all for up front design! A picture tells a thousand words. It has the power to remove ambiguities, clarify the vision, showing what the journey to realise outcomes look like. Start with a day in the life of… scribble out the flow, the user journey. Nothing complicated, boxes and arrows. Then scribble out what the user interface might look like. Done. That’s your up front design. That’s your documentation. That’s your scope. What you do next is up to you, write loads of documents that describe it and produce the software in a waterfall way if you want. I’d prefer you were more lean and adopted agile practices, but whatever you do, start with the picture. I’m convinced it will save much pain later on.