Chapter 15. Seek Technical Excellence
I like logical frameworks and structures. When I think about technical excellence, I can’t help but wonder: “What’s the intellectual basis for design? What does it mean to have a good design?”
Unfortunately, many discussions of “good” design focus on specific techniques. These discussions often involve assumptions that one particular technology is better than another, or that rich object-oriented domain models or stored procedures or service-oriented architectures are obviously good.
With so many conflicting points of view about what’s obviously good, only one thing is clear: good isn’t obvious.
Some folks describe good design as elegant or pretty. They say that it has the Quality Without a Name (QWAN)—an ineffable sense of rightness in the design. The term comes from Christopher Alexander,a building architect whose thoughts on patterns inspired software’s patterns movement.
I have a lot of sympathy for QWAN. Good design is Truth and Beauty. There’s just one problem. My QWAN is not your QWAN. My Truth and Beauty is your Falsehood and Defilement. My beautiful domain models are uglier than your stored procedures, and vice versa.
QWAN is just too vague. I want a better definition of good design.
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