It Will Never Look Like That Peter

朴灿烈づ我的快乐病毒、 2022-08-04 15:33 133阅读 0赞

## It Will Never Look Like That Peter ##

Gillard-Moss

iT Will nEvER looK liKE THAT. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of investing large amounts of time in a design and being confident that the imple- mentation will come out the same. A detailed design can easily fool you into believing you have every angle covered. The greater the detail and the more in-depth the research, the greater your confidence in it. But it is an illusion: it will never look like that.  
The truth is, no matter how in-depth, how well researched, and how well thought-out your design, it will never come out looking the same as in your head. Something will happen, an external factor may affect the design: incor- rect information, a limitation, an odd behaviour in someone else’s code. Or you may have got something wrong: an oversight, an incorrect presumption, a subtle concept missed. Or something will change: the requirements, the tech- nology, or someone may just find a better wayTM.  
Those minor alterations in the design soon stack up and lots of minor altera- tions soon require that one big one has to be made. Before long your original concept is on the floor in pieces, and it’s back to the drawing board. You decide what you needed was more design and more detail, so back you go, and the next architectural vision is clearer, more radical, more perfect than the last.  
  
But before long the same thing happens. Those changes start to appear and shift your design, and developers keep shoving in more and more stuff trying their best to work around the broken design but just breaking it more, and you end up screaming, “Of course it’s got bugs; it was never designed to do that!”  
Design is a discovery process; as we implement, we discover new informa- tion that is often impossible to know upfront. By accepting that design is an ongoing and empirical process in a forever-changing world, we learn that the design process must be flexible and ongoing, too. Clinging to your original designs and trying to force them through is only going to produce one result, so you need to understand that it will never look like that.  
Peter Gillard-Moss is a ThoughtWorker and general memeologist living in the U.K. He has worked in IT since 2000 on many projects, from public-facing web- sites in media and e-commerce to rich-client banking applications and corporate intranets.