October 2007
Beginner
438 pages
15h 52m
English
Content preview from The Art of Agile DevelopmentBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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 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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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.