Bare Naked App

I’m a strong believer that a poorly designed architecture will affect the application - it’s not a case of if, but when, and not in a positive way! Personally I find it so surprising that this phase of a project is ever overlooked, in a hair-pulling, teeth-grinding, shouting “NO” at the top of my voice kind of way! It’s frustrating.

When I’m involved in a project from this stage I always try to take a step back, do some analysis, think of objects, patterns and other UMLesk features. In these few days three books are always an arms length away, I highly recommend them all to anyone involved in development/software architecture.

• Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design Shalloway/Trott
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vlissides
• UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the stanard Object Modeling Language Fowler

I usually start on paper, and once I’ve done 50% or so I’ll move digital. I use Dia on Linux for my UML modeling, however there’s plenty of choice, and they’re all cross platform (apparently).

• Gaphor
• ArgoUML
• Eclipse IDE Plugins

The UML will evolve over time, this should slow down as the product matures (assuming requirements don’t change) however, keeping the UML up-to-date is important.. at some point in the future it will be referenced by someone (myself or another) and if it’s not up-to-date I’d expect that hair-pulling, teeth-grinding, shouting “NO” at the top of my voice frustration all over again.