Why can't we capture the design of software more effectively?
- by Ira Baxter
As engineers, we all "design" artifacts (buildings, programs, circuits, molecules...).
That's an activity (design-the-verb) that produces some kind of result (design-the-noun).
I think we all agree that design-the-noun is a different entity than the artifact itself.
A key activity in the software business (indeed, in any business where the resulting product artifact needs to be enhanced) is to understand the "design (the-noun)". Yet we seem, as a community, to be pretty much complete failures at recording it, as evidenced by the amount of effort people put into rediscovering facts about their code base. Ask somebody to show you the design of their code and see what you get.
I think of a design for software as having:
An explicit specification for what the software is supposed to do and how well it does it
An explicit version of the code (this part is easy, everybody has it)
An explanation for how each part of the code serves to achieve the specification
A rationale as to why the code is the way it is (e.g., why a particualr choice rather than another)
What is NOT a design is a particular perspective on the code. For example [not to pick specifically on] UML diagrams are not designs. Rather, they are properties you can derive from the code, or arguably, properties you wish you could derive from the code. But as a general rule, you can't derive the code from UML.
Why is it that after 50+ years of building software, why don't we have regular ways to express this?
My personal opinion is that we don't have good ways to express this. Even if we do, most of the community seems so focused on getting "code" that design-the-noun gets lost anyway. (IMHO, until design becomes the purpose of engineering, with the artifact extracted from the design, we're not going to get around this).
What have you seen as means for recording designs (in the sense I have described it)?
Explicit references to papers would be good. Why do you think specific and general means have not been succesful? How can we change this?
