S/W Design and Architecture

In the episode 150 of Software Engineering Radio Bob Martin teaches us about Software Craftsmanship. Which is an extended version of a Software Architect for Agile development. According to him, Software Craftsmanship focuses on the skills fo each developers, architects should also be coders in this sense.  Craftsmanship as its name indicates is an approach that instead of focusing on budget focuses on quality. According to him, the prioritization of financial concerns in the software industry is the main illness of it. A good craftsman takes time in knowing the IDE that he/she is going to use, also he/she uses version control such as git or mercurial in the project. Makes unit testing and bug tracking.  According to him,  Agile Developers must adapt to change, but Software Craftsmen every time they make a change must add value, either in features, defect repair or efficiency. The Boy Scout principle is to leave the place cleaner than what you find it, and this applies to code as wh

I had seen the movie before class, and I have always liked it, because it shows how powerful persistence can be. Also, I thought it was great for the class with the think different approach of maybe not inventing something new but reusing something old for new purposes. When they were thinking on how to pass from elliptical to parabolic orbit, they were overthinking on how to create the new math to make that operation possible, when the solution was to use an ancient method. I also thought it was a good movie for the month, a movie to commemorate the fight for women's rights. I found really disappointing the way things were not so long ago, there was not only differentiation between men and women but between "colored" and "white". This can be seen in the movie in many parts, but the best example is when the two ladies are in the bathroom and the supervisor says "I have nothing against you" and Vaughan says "I know you probably think so" beca

The reading was very interesting, talking about design in XP practice is somehow difficult. I completely agree with the author in the sense that there cannot be good software without design. But from what I read, there is a lot of crapy practices in XP. It was interesting reading how XP enables evolutionary design to work by using simple design, and I think it is a good solution to develop quickly, but the problem is that XP should only be used in these cases. XP is not a method to develop a big system, because big systems require a lot of design, it is true that the YAGNI rule applies in a lot of ways to keep entropy down, but sometimes you need to have a clear and simple design that will work with the future upgrades to the system, at least in my experience if the technology is not chosen adequately it can cause a lot of damage to the system and it is during the design face where we choose a specific technology and then stick with it. It is in this case were we need to think of futu

I found really interesting how the reading starts by destroying the pretentiousness in the definition of architect, indeed, I have always found myself disgust by the title. I have worked with many architects in my life, some Reloadus and some Oryzus, whenever you are dealing with an Oryzus architect they do not like to be called architects, they are the leaders of the project and try to involve everyone in the design decisions. The architect Reloadus, instead, believes that his/her title gives him/her some kind of nobility and that they become powerful and untouchable, in my experience, this kind of leader can be left out of the equation and the system can still be very good. When the reading says “We shouldn’t interview anyone who has ‘architect’ on his resume.”  I think he meant that a real architect is humble and would not call himself/herself an architect, at least not in a pretentious way. For the question, who needs an Architect? I believe that every development project needs a