March 2012
Beginner
84 pages
2h 12m
English
Content preview from Code Simplicity
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 3. The Future
The primary question that faces software designers is “How do I make decisions about my software?” When faced with many possible directions you could go in, which option is the best? It’s never a question of which decision would be absolutely right versus which decision would be absolutely wrong. Instead, what we want to know is, “Given many possible decisions, which of those decisions are better than others?” It’s a matter of ranking decisions, and then choosing the best decision out of all the possibilities. For example, a designer might ask himself, “There are 100 different features we could work on today, but we only have the manpower to work on two. Which ones should we work on first?”
The Equation of Software Design
The above question, and indeed every question of this nature in software design, is answered by this equation:
where:
- D
Stands for the desirability of a change. How much do we want to do something?
- V
Stands for the value of a change. How valuable is this change? Usually, you would determine this by asking “How much does this help our users?” although there are other methods of determining value as well.
- E
Stands for the effort involved in performing the change. How much work will the change require?
Essentially, this equation says:
The desirability of any change is directly proportional to the value of the change and inversely proportional to the effort ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.