Chapter 11. The Source Code Is the Design?

Design is an activity, not a phase.

The claim that the source code is the design is one that has motivated many discussions about whether Extreme Programming projects really do design. Although the topic of design was covered in Chapter 7, it is useful here to try to understand the nature of the design activity in software development.

Jack Reeves [Reeves, 1992] explored this back in 1992 in an article titled “What Is Software Design?” Reeves compared software development with engineering disciplines to see how his understanding of engineering design mapped to software development. His conclusion was that, “we are not software engineers because we do not realize what a software design really is.” He then ...

Get Questioning Extreme Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.