Our Heuristics are Shaped Through Experience

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Rebecca

This post is part two of some reflections on a conversation I had with Chelsea Troy about our testing heuristics. You may also want to read part one and Chelsea’s writeup.

I shared with Chelsea how my Smalltalk development background contributed to my testing and design heuristics. I was involved in the early days of Smalltalk at Tektronix as a principal engineer in the AI Machines group. After a yearlong stint managing the software group through product introduction, I switched back to full-time engineering. Among other things, I added features to Smalltalk including color graphics, fonts, and support for low-level OS calls. All our code was visible to our users, and we had a strong engineering culture.

I learned how to work effectively in the Smalltalk environment by studying existing code, figuring out what it did, and understanding its coding and design style. I also observed more experienced Smalltalk programmers. Kent Beck, along with Ward Cunningham, and other Tek Lab’s folks were some of the very earliest Smalltalk application programmers. Ward and Kent worked together, developing prototypes and exploring what Smalltalk was good at. Many ideas about Extreme Programming (and TDD) and object-design can be traced back to these programming experiences.

The Smalltalk image was always running. It contained the entire development environment and had a browser where you could look at existing code and add your own. Much of my time was spent experimenting with and reading existing code, then trying to fit my new code in. The code I wrote was a mix of new classes as well as extensions or modifications to existing ones. To show someone else how to use your code, you’d create a workspace—a scratchpad window—and put snippets of commented code for them to read, edit, and evaluate it. By convention, methods were categorized (see the third pane of the System Browser below, which shows the categories for the abstract Collection class). Other classes also had a testing category, but it was not used for what you might think! The testing category for the class Collection included methods for querying (i.e. testing) its contents.

What a typical Smalltalk-80 system image looked like courtesy of https://randoc.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/tektronix-smalltalk-workstations-4400-and-4300-series/

So how did programmers test Smalltalk code? I didn’t have any conventions to follow for organizing my tests (and not inconsequentially, leaving test code around would clutter up the Smalltalk image). Since I could highlight code anywhere and execute it, I tested code as I wrote it. I could step through code with a debugger, change it on the fly, and run it again. I tested my code into existence, but didn’t leave around any tests.

In an article I wrote about Color Smalltalk here’s how I described this experience: “… the workspace, lets programmers experiment with code without actually incorporating the experimental code into the valid, running environment. A programmer can write, execute and debug code in a workspace, then pull it into the Smalltalk application when the new code is tested and operational.”

While this statement is mostly true, it is also misleading. Anything I did as a programmer would add more objects to and change the state of the running Smalltalk image. Code you executed in a workspace changed the image (sometimes with catastrophic results, especially if you were tinkering with basic low-level system functionality as I was). But the Smalltalk environment and tools made it so easy to back up a step or two, revise your code, and try again, even with code that mucked with low-level stuff.

Kent’s Smalltalk experience heavily influenced how he thought about incremental development. But when it came to testing, I suspect he tried to boil down his Smalltalk experiences into practices that would be more “failsafe” for programmers who didn’t work in such a dynamic and forgiving development environment. Kent’s thinking about testing has evolved since he wrote his books. In an interview with Andrew Binstock in 2019, Kent and Andrew chat about this evolution:

Binstock: Do you still work on strictly a test-first basis?
Beck: No. Sometimes, yes.
Binstock: OK. Tell me how your thoughts have evolved on that. When I look at your book Extreme Programming Explained, there seems to be very little wiggle room in terms of that. Has your view changed?
Beck: Sure. So there’s a variable that I didn’t know existed at that time, which is really important for the trade-off about when automated testing is valuable. It is the half-life of the line of code. If you’re in exploration mode and you’re just trying to figure out what a program might do and most of your experiments are going to be failures and be deleted in a matter of hours or perhaps days, then most of the benefits of TDD don’t kick in, and it slows down the experimentation—a latency between “I wonder” and “I see.” You want that time to be as short as possible. If tests help you make that time shorter, fine, but often, they make the latency longer, and if the latency matters and the half-life of the line of code is short, then you shouldn’t write tests.
Binstock: Indeed, when exploring, if I run into errors, I may backtrack and write some tests just to get the code going where I think it’s supposed to go.
Beck: I learned there are lots of forms of feedback. Tests are just one form of feedback, and there are some really good things about them, but depending on the situation you’re in, there can also be some very substantial costs. Then you have to decide, is this one of these cases where the trade-off tips one way or the other? People want the rule, the one absolute rule, but that’s just sloppy thinking as far as I’m concerned.

Practicing TDD ensures developers write tests. The underlying value heuristic is, “any tests are better than no tests.” But if we take Kent’s more recent thoughts to heart, we shouldn’t test without thinking through some consequences. Kent’s more recent guiding heuristic: Test when it matters and when you need a safety net. Think through both the benefits and costs of testing. If you are exploring, don’t let testing slow you down.

There is no single “definitive” answer to the question, “when should I test?”

Develop Test Strategies Based on System Context

Chelsea asked, “So, how do you determine what kinds of tests to write?”

I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, either. So, I shared a few stories. I’ve worked with clients unschooled in TDD. They write code, test it a little, and then throw these initial tests away. They build successful products. The tests they tend to keep are regression tests, tests that demonstrate a quirky bug that has been fixed (and to ensure that it stays that way). It’s always a bet.

If code is stable, and the tests always pass, running tests all the time isn’t buying any new information. Even worse, passing tests can give you a false sense of security about your code’s quality. So why do we write tests?

I like to focus on writing tests that check that stable (relatively unchanging) system expectations still hold, and that demonstrate ways new capabilities can be safely added. I also try to write tests that capture expectations I have around my system’s behavior.

For complex systems, though, this can be difficult. Unforeseen side effects can pop up in strange places (changing code in one place unexpectedly causing other code to break in a distant part of the system). It’s impossible to test for every possible edge case and you don’t know all the dependencies.

I remember Kent Beck telling this oddball story of writing his first TDD code when he went to work at Facebook. His code, which passed all his tests, suddenly caused other tests for other parts of the system to fail. Rather than revert his code, those familiar with the system decided to throw out those failing tests. Seems weird, but they knew those tests were brittle, and making some wrong assumptions. When you find problems with tests, think carefully about whether it is appropriate to add additional tests to ensure that things don’t break, whether your existing tests are brittle, or whether your assumptions are wrong.

Data Scientists Have Different Testing Values

When you need to process massive amounts of data, and the code for processing of that data is predictable, there is little value in repeatedly running functional tests that always pass.

I worked for a number of years for a client doing healthcare analytics on patient medical data. Sometimes, their heuristic for verifying an algorithm would be: test that the new code works by comparing its results against code written in an entirely different system/programming language. They would take a massive cut of the data and run it through and compare the results.

Another heuristic they sometimes used to test new algorithms and capabilities was to run their code and compare their results against those reported in published research papers. Where the results differed, they need to reason about those differences (sometimes it was a problem with their code; at other times, it was that their code was more accurate at choosing cohorts or their statistical algorithms were better). Some person needed to critically analyze the results, reason why the discrepancies were there, and determine what, if anything, to do about them. This process couldn’t be automated.

Chelsea works with data scientists at Mozilla on sanitizing personal data for searches. The rules for this are complicated, language-specific, and sometimes people enter search terms in more than one language. She finds data scientists don’t share the same testing values as many software developers do.

Data scientists make informed assumptions about aggregated data. If those assumptions don’t hold, they reassess the data processing rules and revisit their assumptions. To them, testing is insufficient to ensure system quality. Monitoring actual system behavior against expected data characteristics, however, is critical. When the data characteristics being monitored fall outside of expected tolerances, this triggers developers to look into the situation. Developers then run some automated tests to determine if something is wrong with their code. If those automated tests pass, they then call on a data scientist to analyze a sample of the data and decide what to do. Something has changed and there likely needs to be some change to either in the assertions about the data’s characteristics or the rules for handling it.

Trialing new Heuristics

Chelsea and I appreciate what we can learn from people with different backgrounds: data scientists, QA folks, testers, and new colleagues. There are many different ways to test and design software. And if I don’t hold onto my preferred heuristics too tightly, I might learn something.

But how do I decide when to try out some new heuristics or to stick with what I know?

If things are going well, I’m not as motivated to try out new ideas. I need a small nudge. I’ll try new some new-to-me heuristics if I feel I have some wiggle room. Let me experiment, practice, and think through the consequences. Give me a bit of time to let new values and practices soak in.

When I start to work on a new system or folks from different backgrounds, that too, is another opportunity to try out new ways of working.

But under pressure, I find myself narrowing my focus and sticking with what I know best (even if it is a poor option). So, if I can, I catch myself and take a small step back from problem solving. I pause, take a breath, and ask: If my heuristics aren’t currently working for me, what are some options?

If I want to introduce a test-first TDDer to my testing approach, I might suggest a modest experiment: “Let’s work together on some design and coding problems and compare our two approaches. Let’s find out what tests we come up with following my test-driven development approach. Let’s try your test-first TDD on a similar problem and see what tests we come up with. Let’s see what we learn.”

At the very minimum, I hope we’d learn of our shared value: we both value tested code. We might learn from each other more about the kinds of tests we like to write. Or how many tests we think are needed. Or how we rework existing tests. We might share some heuristics for deciding what next test to write or what isn’t worth testing. Through experimentation and reflection, we can grow and learn from each other.

Testing, Testing…our Heuristics

Posted on April 19, 2023 by Rebecca

We gather heuristics through conversations — We gather heuristics through storytelling and conversations

Recently Chelsea Troy and I chatted over Zoom about software testing heuristics. I met Chelsea last year at DDD Europe. In this and a couple of snack-sized posts, I will reflect on some highlights of our conversation. Chelsea has also written about our conversation.

A Leading Question Leads to Some Heuristics

I started by asking, “What is important about testing that people should get but don’t?”

Chelsea answered, that while Test Driven Development (TDD) is useful, it doesn’t solve all testing needs. If developers are oversold on the benefits of TDD, they can become jaded on testing in general. They shouldn’t. TDD doesn’t include specific practices that address resilience, or reliability. But it is useful for developing and testing deterministic code.

Chelsea shared the experience of learning first-hand how TDD didn’t have all the answers to testing. She worked on a team of TDD enthusiasts developing a mobile app for a client. Although the team thought they knew how to develop quality software, their initial prototype developed following TDD didn’t address these challenging requirements: being usable under extreme weather conditions, having a simple UX, and functioning when only intermittently connected to the internet and their backend software. They needed to add more design and testing techniques to their toolbox, along with their TDD testing. Chelsea also said that she learned a lot about testing for these kinds requirements from their client’s QA team.

Some heuristics we’ve touched on:

Use TDD to develop and test functionality of deterministic software.
Use other strategies to design and test for software system qualities such as usability, performance, reliability, or resilience.
Match your testing strategies and tactics to your application’s development and execution context.

A Brief Introduction to Heuristics

I have been intrigued by software development heuristics, ever since I read Billy Vaughn Koen’s Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer’s approach to problem solving. Koen defines a heuristic as, “anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible.” Heuristics are never guaranteed. When a heuristic fails, you back up and try another one.

I enjoy hunting for heuristics while designing and coding with others. Open-ended conversations where we swap stories and reflect on our heuristics are another great opportunity. Generally, I look for three kinds of heuristics:

Action heuristics. Things we do to solve our immediate problem. There are many action heuristics. Design patterns are one well-known form of action heuristic. We know these heuristics by name because authors took the time to write up them as named software patterns. But there are many testing and development techniques both smaller and larger than patterns. For example, in Test-Driven Development (TDD), the practice of “write a test, then write code to pass the test” is a heuristic for incrementally designing and implementing tested code.

Value Heuristics. Values motivate our actions. Underlying TDD is the value: Testing should be an integral part of design and coding.

Our values determine what actions seem appropriate. Because I value understandable code, I I take several actions to make my code more comprehensible: I give methods, functions, and variables meaningful names; keep code in methods short; and write code at the same level of detail in a method, factoring out lower-level details into helper methods.

Values depend on context. As the context shifts, so do our values. This doesn’t mean we are fickle; just pragmatic. Most of the time we aren’t conscious of making these shifts. When cutting and pasting code from stack overflow, I don’t value code understandability so much as I do the ability to quickly determine whether that code addresses my current problem. If it does, then I rewrite that code to make it clearer and to fit with the style in my existing codebase. In production code, I do value understandability.

Guiding heuristics. Heuristics that lead to related actions. For example, Chelsea shared one guiding heuristic: Don’t treat test code the same as production code, instead, make each test understandable in isolation. This leads her to write self-contained test methods. She doesn’t like a test where she has to read the code that it calls on before she can understand the test. She also isn’t a fan of applying the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) heuristic to test code.

Comparing competing heuristics

Chelsea mentioned that understandable tests can also serve as valuable design documentation and discovery tools. It’s easier to modify test code that is self-contained, rerun it, and explore how the software responds.

I asked Chelsea whether she would put aside her heuristic of keeping tests self-contained if there were compelling reasons. What if set up conditions for tests took a long time (for example, doing a cut of a database in order to build an in-memory cache of test data)? What if there was complex code that was repeated in similar tests but was slightly altered? Did someone make cut-and-paste-modify-and-reuse errors, or were there valid reasons for these differences?

Factoring common initialization code out of tests into common setup code, provides a “standard” execution context for a suite of tests. It also makes it easier to vary that context and rerun the test suite. Factoring out code common to several tests and clearly labeling what it does eliminates having to second guess reasons for slight variations in test code.

Depending on your situation and personal preferences, you may choose the heuristic, “Keep code in tests so you can understand and easily manipulate it,” or the other, “Factor out expensive or error prone code into common code shared by tests.” These heuristics compete with each other. Neither is better. They are simply alternative ways to structure your test code.

The Value of Knowing your Values

If people don’t know your values (and how they differ from their values), they may not understand why you prefer to work the way you do. For example, while I value testing, I don’t practice test-first development.

If you understand TDD to mean strictly write tests before writing any code, your TDD heuristic is: begin by writing a small test, then write code that proves that the test fails, then rewrite your code to pass that test. Don’t add any more code than necessary to make the test pass. Do this repeatedly until you’ve fully implemented your code.

At the end of a TDD cycle, you have a bunch of tests and fully functioning code that passes those tests. Working this way, you typically implement a single class at a time. You test and implement lower-level functionality, then repeat the process to develop the code that uses that functionality. Your software tends to grow from the “bottom” up.

I value testing, but typically design and implement several classes that work together at the same time. Once I prove to myself that my overall design hangs together (through some sort of simulation), I implement it. When finished, I check in code for several classes along with tests that demonstrate their behavior. My code is tested, but I don’t leave around lots of low-level tests.

For example, I may use a strategy pattern to calculate charges for different items on an invoice. I would initially implement each individual strategy class and check that it worked as I expected. But I’d remove most if not all tests for those individual strategies once I proved to myself that they worked. Their code is simple enough to read at a glance. Once I get low level classes working (especially if they don’t retain any state), I don’t need to keep tests around to ensure that they work. Once implemented, they rarely change. If I do need to revise them, at that point I might reconsider my testing heuristics (and add some tests that reflect these changes). The valuable tests I tend to preserve are those that determine which strategy to use, how to add new kinds of strategies, and different ways to apply discounts and special pricing.

Let’s contrast my testing heuristics with those of test-first TDDers.

We both share this value heuristic: Value code that has tests over code (even if it works) that doesn’t have tests.

Test-first TDDers apply this heuristic: Write tests as you incrementally design code. Interleave testing and coding, repeatedly. Start with the simplest test and the simplest implementation. Only implement enough functionality so that your latest test passes. Build functionality and tests in small increments; each increment moving you closer to your final tested design.

They also have this guiding heuristic: You produce a cleaner design if you write tests first before writing any code.

I don’t share that heuristic.

My heuristic for developing designed, tested code is: Consider the design of one or more classes working together to achieve some functionality. Model your design using some lightweight technique, such as CRC cards (Class-Responsibility-Collaborators) or whiteboard sketches. Once you know what each class’ responsibilities are and how they interact, then implement them. Write simple tests and debug as you implement, but remove them if they are low level (and other code that has tests exercises their functionality). Keep only a lean set of illustrative tests that demonstrate how the classes work together and ensure that your design will continue to function properly.

At the end of my design/development cycle, I may write additional tests, revise existing ones, or remove insignificant tests. I use this grooming and cleanup step, before committing my code, as one way to double check my work.

Chelsea summarized my TDD heuristic as: Put tests in at the right level of abstraction once you know what your design is about.

Chelsea cautions, however, that if you don’t know what the right level of abstraction is and you follow test-first TDD heuristics by rote, you end up with tests at too low a level. Also, if you don’t have heuristics for pruning them, you end up with too many.

I view most testing I do while I implement my design as temporary scaffolding. Since I’ve already sketched out design ideas before coding, tests are not my primary tool for design. I test to verify my design. If I need to adjust my design as I implement it (and I expect to), that’s OK. I keep tweaking it and my code, and continue testing.

I suspect the biggest difference in our two approaches is that test-first TDDers don’t view their tests as temporary scaffolding, and I don’t view the cycle of test-first TDD as the only (or best) way to understand what a design should be. We both value tested, well-designed code.

Bringing to light the different values that underlie competing heuristics can be illuminating. But how can we get others to appreciate and try out our heuristics? How can we approach new-to-us heuristics with an open mind? I’ll touch on these topics and more in my next post.

2021 Year End Review

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Rebecca

Here’s a quick recap of blog posts I wrote in 2021.

Agile Experience Reports

Juggling Multiple Scrum Teams I introduce Iuri Ilatanski’s experience report about life as a multi-tasking Scrum Master. Juggling involves meeting each team’s specific needs. I was Iuri’s “shepherd”—his sounding board and advocate—as he wrote this report presented at Agile 2021. Thank you, Iuri, for being so open to discussion, reflection, and the hard work of revising your writing.

Agile Experience Reports: A Fresh Look at Timeless Content I spent August organizing the vast Agile Alliance experience reports collection hosted on the Agile Alliance’s website. The collection includes reports from 2014 to 2021 as well five XP conferences. Experience reports are personal stories that pack a punch. There are many gems of wisdom here.

Domain Driven Design

Splitting a Domain Across Multiple Bounded Contexts Sometimes it can more productive to meet the specific needs of individual users rather than to spend the time designing common abstractions in support of a “unified” model.

Design and Reality We shouldn’t assume domain experts have all the language they need to describe their problem (and all that you need to do as a software designer is to “capture” that language and make those real-world concepts evident in your code).

Models and Metaphors Listening to the language people use in modeling discussions can lead to new insights. Sometimes we find metaphors, that when pushed on, lead to a clearer understanding of the problem and clarity in our design.

Decision Making

Noisy Decisions After reading Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein I wrote about noisy decisions in the context of software design and architecture. These authors define noise as undesirable variability in human judgment. Often, we want to reduce noise and there are ways we can do so, even in the context of software.

Is it Noise or Euphony? At other times, however, we desire variability in judgments. In these situations variability isn’t noise, but instead an opportunity for euphony. And if you leverage that variability, you just might turn up some unexpected, positive results.

Heuristics Revisited

Too Much Salt? We build a more powerful heuristic toolkit when we learn the reasons why (and when) particular heuristics work the way they do. I now think it is equally important to seek the why behind the what you are doing as you cultivate your personal heuristics.

Design and Reality

Posted on September 13, 2021 by Rebecca and Mathias

Reframing the problem through design.

“The transition to a really deep model is a profound shift in your thinking and demands a major change to the design.”
— Domain-Driven Design, Eric Evans

There is a fallacy about how domain modelling works. The misconception is that we can design software by discovering all the relevant concepts in the domain, turn them into concepts in our design, add some behaviors, and voilà, we’ve solved our problem. It’s a simplistic perception of how design works: a linear path from A to B:

understand the problem,
apply design,
end up with a solution.

That idea was so central to early Object-Oriented Design, that one of us (Rebecca) thought to refute it in her book:

“Early object design books including [my own] Designing Object-Oriented Software [Wirfs-Brock et al 1990], speak of finding objects by identifying things (noun phrases) written in a design specification. In hindsight, this approach seems naive. Today, we don’t advocate underlining nouns and simplistically modeling things in the real world. It’s much more complicated than that. Finding good objects means identifying abstractions that are part of your application’s domain and its execution machinery. Their correspondence to real-world things may be tenuous, at best. Even when modeling domain concepts, you need to look carefully at how those objects fit into your overall application design.”
— Object Design, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Domain language vs Ubiquitous Language

The idea has persisted in many naive interpretations of Domain-Driven Design as well. Domain language and Ubiquitous Language are often conflated. They’re not the same.

Domain language is what is used by people working in the domain. It’s a natural language, and therefore messy. It’s organic: concepts are introduced out of necessity, without deliberation, without agreement, without precision. Terminology spreads across the organization or fades out. Meaning shifts. People adapt old terms into new meanings, or terms acquire multiple, ambiguous meanings. It exists because it works, at least well enough for human-to-human communication. A domain language (like all language) only works in the specific context it evolved in.

For us system designers, messy language is not good enough. We need precise language with well understood concepts, and explicit context. This is what a Ubiquitous Language is: a constructed, formalized language, agreed upon by stakeholders and designers, to serve the needs of our design. We need more control over this language than we have over the domain language. The Ubiquitous Language has to be deeply connected to the domain language, or there will be discord. The level of formality and precision in any Ubiquitous Language depends on its environment: a meme sharing app and an oil rig control system have different needs.

Drilling Mud

Talking of oil rigs:

Rebecca was invited to consult for a company that makes hardware and software for oil rigs. She was asked to help with object design and modelling, working on redesigning the control system that monitors and manages sensors and equipment on the oil rig. Drilling causes a lot of friction, and “drilling mud” (a proprietary chemical substance) is used as a lubricant. It’s also used as a carrier for the rocks and debris you get from drilling, lifting it all up and out of the hole. Equipment monitors the drilling mud pressure, and by changing the composition of the mud during drilling, you can control that pressure. Too much pressure is a really bad thing.

And then an oil rig in the gulf exploded.

As the news stories were coming out, the team found out that the rig was using a competitor’s equipment. Whew! The team started speculating about what could have happened, and were thinking about how something like that could happen with their own systems. Was it faulty equipment, sensors, the telemetry, communications between various components, the software?

Scenarios

When in doubt, look for examples. The team ran through scenarios. What happens when a catastrophic condition occurs? How do people react? When something fails, it’s a noisy environment for the oil rig engineers: sirens blaring, alarms going off, … We discovered that when a problem couldn’t be fixed immediately, the engineers, in order to concentrate, would turn off the alarms after a while. When a failure is easy to fix, the control system logs reflect that the alarm went on and was turned off a few minutes later.

But for more consequential failures, even though these problems take much longer to resolve, it still shows up on the logs as being resolved within minutes. Then, when people study the logs, it looks like the failure was resolved quickly. But that’s totally inaccurate. This may look like a software bug, but it’s really a flaw in the model. And we should use it as an opportunity to improve that model.

The initial modeling assumption is that alarms are directly connected to the emergency conditions in the world. However, the system’s perception of the world is distorted: when the engineers turn off the alarm, the system believes the emergency is over. But it’s not, turning an alarm off doesn’t change the emergency condition in the world. The alarms are only indirectly connected to the emergency. If it’s indirectly connected, there’s something else in between, that doesn’t exist in our model. The model is an incomplete representation of a fact of the world, and that could be catastrophic.

A Breakthrough

The team explored scenarios, specifically the weird ones, the awkward edge cases where nobody really knows how the system behaves, or even how it should behave. One such scenario is when two separate sensor measurements raise alarms at the same time. The alarm sounds, an engineer turns it off, but what happens to the second alarm? Should the alarm still sound or not? Should turning off one turn off the other? If it didn’t turn off, would the engineers think the off switch didn’t work and just push it again?

By working through these scenarios, the team figured out there was a distinction between the alarm sounding, and the state of alertness. Now, in this new model, when measurements from the sensors exceed certain thresholds or exhibit certain patterns, the system doesn’t sound the alarm directly anymore. Instead, it raises an alert condition, which is also logged. It’s this alert condition that is associated with the actual problem. The new alert concept is now responsible for sounding the alarm (or not). The alarm can still be turned off, but the alert condition remains. Two alert conditions with different causes can coexist without being confused by the single alarm. This model decouples the emergency from the sounding of the alarm.

The old model didn’t make that distinction, and therefore it couldn’t handle edge cases very well. When at last the team understood the need for separating alert conditions from the alarms, they couldn’t unsee it. It’s one of those aha-moments that seem obvious in retrospect. Such distinctions are not easily unearthed. It’s what Eric Evans calls a Breakthrough.

An Act of Creation

There was a missing concept, and at the first the team didn’t know something was missing. It wasn’t obvious at first, because there wasn’t a name for “alert condition” in the domain language. The oil rig engineers’ job isn’t designing software or creating a precise language, they just want to be able to respond to alarms and fix problems in peace. Alert conditions didn’t turn up in a specification document, or in any communication between the oil rig engineers. The concept was not used implicitly by the engineers or the software; no, the whole concept did not exist.

Then where did the concept come from?

People in the domain experienced the problem, but without explicit terminology, they couldn’t express the problem to the system designers. So it’s us, the designers, who created it. It’s an act of creative modeling. The concept is invented. In our oil rig monitoring domain, it was a novel way to perceive reality.

Of course, in English, alert and alarm exist. They are almost synonymous. But in our Ubiquitous Language, we agreed to make them distinct. We designed our Ubiquitous Language to fit our purpose, and it’s different from the domain language. After we introduced “alert conditions”, the oil rig engineers incorporated it in their language. This change in the domain is driven by the design. This is a break with the linear, unidirectional understanding of moving from problem to solution through design. Instead, through design, we reframed the problem.
Is it a better model?

How do we know that this newly invented model is in fact better (specifically, more fit for purpose)? We find realistic scenarios and test them against the alert condition model, as well as other candidate models. In our case, with the new model, the logs will be more accurate, which was the original problem.

But in addition to helping with the original problem, a deeper model often opens new possibilities. This alert conditions model suggests several:

Different measurements can be associated with the same alert.
Alert conditions can be qualified.
We can define alarm behaviors for simultaneous alert conditions, for example by spacing the alarms, or picking different sound patterns.
Critical alerts could block less critical ones from hogging the alarm.
Alert conditions can be lowered as the situation improves, without resolving them.
…

These new options are relevant, and likely to bring value. Yet another sign we’d hit on a better model is that we had new conversations with the domain experts. A lot of failure scenarios became easier to detect and respond to. We started asking, what other alert conditions could exist? What risks aren’t we mitigating yet? How should we react?

Design Creates New Realities

In a world-centric view of design, only the sensors and the alarms existed in the real world, and the old software model reflected that accurately. Therefore it was an accurate model. The new model that includes alerts isn’t more “accurate” than the old one, it doesn’t come from the real world, it’s not more realistic, and it isn’t more “domain-ish”. But it is more useful. Sensors and alarms are objective, compared to alert conditions. Something is an alert condition because in this environment, we believe it should be an alert condition, and that’s subjective.

The model works for the domain and is connected to it, but it is not purely a model of the problem domain. It better addresses the problems in the contexts we envision. The solution clarified the problem. Having only a real world focus for modelling blinds us to better options and innovations.

These creative introductions of novel concepts into the model are rarely discussed in literature about modelling. Software design books talk about turning concepts into types and data structures, but what if the concept isn’t there yet? Forming distinctions, not just abstractions, however, can help clarify a model. These distinctions create opportunities.

The model must be radically about its utility in solving the problem.

“Our measure of success lies in how clearly we invent a software reality that satisfies our application’s requirements—and not in how closely it resembles the real world.”
— Object Design, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Written by Mathias Verraes and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. Special thanks to Eric Evans for the spot on feedback and constructive advice.

Splitting a Domain Across Multiple Bounded Contexts

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Rebecca and Mathias

How designing for business opportunities and the rate of change may give you better contexts.

I have started collaborating with Mathias Verraes and writing on the topic of Bounded Contexts and strategic design. This blog post is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing discussion about design choices and their impacts on sustainable software systems. –Rebecca

Imagine a wholesaler of parts for agricultural machines. They’ve built a B2B webshop that resellers and machine servicing companies use to order. In their Ubiquitous Language, an Order represents this automated process. It enables customers to pick products, apply the right discounts, and push it to Shipment.

Our wholesaler merges with a competitor: They’re an older player with a solid customer base and a huge catalog. They also have an ordering system, but it’s much more traditional: customers call, and an account manager enters the order, applies an arbitrary discount, and pushes it to Shipment.

The merged company still has a single Sales Subdomain, but it now has two Sales Bounded Contexts. They both have concepts like Order and Discount in their models, and these concepts have fundamentally the same meaning. The employees from both wholesalers agree on what an order or a discount is. But they have different processes for using them, they enter different information in the forms, and there are different business rules.

In the technical sense that difference is expressed in the object design, the methods, the workflows, the logic for applying discounts, the database representation, and some of the language. It runs deeper though: for a software designer to be productive in either Bounded Context, they’d have to understand the many distinctions between the two models. Bounded Contexts represent Understandability Boundaries.

In a perfectly designed system, our ideal Bounded Contexts would usually align nicely with the boundaries of the subdomains. In reality though, Bounded Contexts follow the contours of the evolution of the system. Systems evolve along with the needs and opportunities of organisations. And unfortunately, needs and opportunities don’t often arise in ways that match our design sensibilities. We’re uncomfortable with code that could be made more consistent, if only we had the time to do so. We want to unify concepts and craft clean abstractions, because we think that is what we should do to create a well-designed system. But that might not be the better option.

Deliberate Design Choices

The example above trivially shows that a single subdomain may be represented by multiple Bounded Contexts.

Bounded Contexts may or may not align with app or service boundaries. Similarly, they may or may not align with domain boundaries. Domains live in the problem space. They are how an organisation perceives its areas of activity and expertise. Bounded Contexts are part of the solution space; they are deliberate design choices. As a systems designer, you choose these boundaries to manage the understandability of the system, by using different models to solve different aspects of the domain.

You might argue that in the wholesaler merger, the designers didn’t have a choice. It’s true that the engineers didn’t choose to merge the companies. And there will always be external triggers that put constraints on our designs. At this point however, the systems designers can make a case for:

merging the two Sales Contexts,
migrating one to the other,
building a new Sales Context to replace both,
postponing this effort,
or not doing anything and keeping the existing two Contexts.

These are design choices, even if ultimately the CEO picks from those options (because of the expected ROI for example). Perhaps, after considering the trade-offs, keeping the two Sales Contexts side by side is the best strategic design choice for now, as it allows the merged company to focus on new opportunities. After all, the existing systems do serve their purpose. The takeaway here is that having two Bounded Contexts for a single Subdomain can be a perfectly valid choice.

Twenty Commodities Traders

When there is no external trigger (as in the wholesaler merger), would you ever choose to split a single domain over multiple Contexts, deliberately?

One of us was brought in to consult for a small commodities trader. They were focused on a few specialty commodities, and consisted of 20 traders, some operational support roles, and around 10 developers. The lead engineer gave a tour of the system, which consisted of 20 Bounded Contexts for the single Trading Domain. There was one Context for each trader.

This seemed odd, and our instinct was to identify similarities, abstract them, and make them reusable. The developers were doing none of that. At best they were copy-pasting chunks of each other’s code. The lead engineer’s main concern was “Are we doing the optimal design for our situation?” They were worried they were in a big mess.

Were they?

Every trader had their own representation of a trade. There were even multiple representations of money throughout the company. The traders’ algorithms were different, although many were doing somewhat similar things. Each trader had a different dashboard. The developers used the same third party libraries, but when they shared their own code between each other, they made no attempt at unifying it. Instead, they copied code, and modified it over time as they saw fit. A lot of the work involved mathematical algorithms, more than typical business oriented IT.

It turned out that every trader had unique needs. They needed to move fast: they experimented with different algorithms, projections, and ways of looking at the market. The developers were serving the traders, and worked in close collaboration with them, constantly turning their ideas into new code. The traders were highly valued, they were the prima donnas in a high stress, highly competitive environment. You couldn’t be a slow coder or a math slacker if you wanted to be part of this. There were no (Jira) tickets, no feature backlogs. It was the ultimate fast feedback loop between domain experts and programmers.

Things were changing very rapidly, every day. Finding the right abstractions would have taken a lot of coordination, it would slow development down drastically. An attempt at unifying the code would have destroyed the company.

This design was not full of technical debt. It also wasn’t a legacy problem, where the design had accidentally grown this way over the years. The code was working. This lack of unifying abstractions was a deliberate design choice, fit for purpose, even if it seems like a radical choice at first. And all the developers and traders were happy with it.

These weren’t merely separate programs with a lot of repeated code either. This was a single domain, split over 20 Bounded Contexts, each with their own domain model, their own Ubiquitous Language, and their own rate of change. Coordinating the language and concepts in the models, would have increased the friction in this high speed environment. By deliberately choosing to design individual Contexts, they eliminated that friction.

Trade-offs

There are consequences of this design choice: When a developer wanted help with a problem, they had to bring that other developer up to speed. Each developer, when working in another bounded context, expected that they’d have to make a context switch. After all, their terms and concepts were different from each other, even though they shared similar terminology. Context-switching has a cost, which you’ve probably experienced if you’ve work on different projects throughout a day. But here, because the Contexts were clearly well-bounded, this didn’t cause many problems. And sometimes, by explaining a problem to another developer with a similar background (but a different Bounded Context), solutions became obvious.

Multiple Bounded Contexts in Ordinary IT Systems

The trading system is an extreme example, and you won’t come across many environments where a single Subdomain with 20 Bounded Contexts would make sense. But there are many common situations where you should consider splitting a domain. If in your company, the rules about pricing for individual and corporate customers are different, perhaps efforts to unify these rules in a single domain model will cost more than it is worth. Or in a payroll system, where the rules and processes for salaried and hourly employees are different, you might be better off splitting this domain.

Conclusion

The question is not: Can I unify this? Of course you can. But should you? Perhaps not. The right Context boundaries follow the contours of the business. Different areas change at different times and at different speeds. And over time what appears similar may diverge in surprising and unexpectedly productive ways (if given the opportunity). Squeezing concepts into a single model is constraining. You’re complicating your model by making it serve two distinct business needs, and taking a continued coordination cost. It’s a hidden dependency debt.

There’s two heuristics we can derive here:

Bounded Contexts shouldn’t serve the designer’s sensibilities and need for perfection, but enable business opportunities.
The Rate of Change Heuristic: Consider organizing Bounded Contexts so they manage related concepts that change at the same pace.

Written by Mathias Verraes @mathiasverraes and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock @rebeccawb.

Reconciling New Design Approaches with What You Already Know

Image

Last week at the deliver:Agile conference in Nashville I attended a talk by Autumn Crossman explaining the benefits of functional programming to us old timey object-oriented designers. I also attended the session led by Declan Whelan and Sean Button, on “Overcoming dys-functional programming. Leverage & transcend years of OO know-how with FP.”

The implication in both talks was that although objects have strengths, they are often abused and not powerful enough for some of today’s problems. And that now is an opportune time for us OO designers to make some changes to our preferred ways of working.

Yet I find myself asking: when should I step away from what I’ve been doing and know how to do well and step into a totally new design approach?

No doubt, functional programming is becoming more popular. But objects aren’t going away, either.

There are some benefits of pure functional solutions to certain design problems. Pure functional programming solutions don’t have side effects. You make stream-processing steps easily composable by designing little, single purpose functions operating over immutable data. You are mutating data, it just isn’t being mutated in place. In OO terms, you aren’t changing the internal state of objects, you are creating new objects with different internal state. By using map-reduce you can avoid loop/iteration/end-condition programming errors (letting powerful functions handle those details). No need to define variables and counters. This is already familiar to Smalltalk programmers via do:, collect:, select:, and inject:into: methods which operate on collections (Ruby has its equivalents, too). And by operating on immutable data, multi-threading and parallelization get easier.

I get that.

But I can create immutable data using OO technology, too. Ever hear of the Value Object pattern? Long ago I learned to create designs that included both stateful and immutable objects. And to understand when it is appropriate to do so. I discovered and tweaked my heuristics for when it made sense to stream over immutable data and when to modify data in place. But in complex systems (or when you are new to libraries) it can be difficult to suss out what others are doing (or in the case of libraries, what they are forcing you to do).

But that’s not the point, really. The point is, once you understand how to use any technique, as you gain proficiency, you learn when and where to exploit it.

But is pure functional programming really, finally the panacea we’ve all been looking for? Or is it just another powerful tool in our toolkit? How powerful is it? Where is it best applied?

I’m still working through my answers to these questions. My answers will most likely differ from yours (after all, your design context and experience is different). That’s OK.

Whenever we encounter new approaches we need to reconcile them with our current preferred ways of designing. We may find ourselves going against the grain of popular trends or going with the flow. Whatever. We shouldn’t be afraid of trying something new.

Yet we also shouldn’t too easily discount and discard approaches that have worked in the past (and that still work under many conditions). Or, worse yet, we shouldn’t feel anxious that the expertise we’ve acquired is dated or that our expertise can’t be transferred to new technologies and design approaches. We can learn. We can adapt. And, yet, we don’t have to throw out everything we know in order to become proficient in other design approaches. But we do have to have an open mind.

We also shouldn’t be seduced by promises of “silver bullets.” Be aware that evangelists, enthusiasts, and entrepreneur frequently oversell the utility of technologies. To get us to adopt something new, they often encourage us to discard what has worked for us in the past.

While I like some aspects of functional programming, I see the value in multi-paradigm programming languages. I’m not a purist. Recently I’ve written some machine learning algorithms in Python for some Coursera courses I’ve taken. During that exercise, I rediscovered that powerful libraries make up for the shortcomings and quirks of any programming language. I still think Python has its fair share of quirks.

And while some consider Python to support functional programming, it isn’t a pure functional language. It takes that middle ground, as one stack overflow writer observes:

“And it should be noted that the “FP-ness” of a language isn’t binary, it’s on a continuum. Python doesn’t have built in support for efficient manipulation of immutable structures as far as I know. That’s one large knock against it, as immutability can be considered a strong aspect of FP. It also doesn’t support tail-call optimization, which can be a problem when dealing with recursive solutions. As you mentioned though, it does have first-class functions, and built-in support for some idioms, such as map/comprehensions/generator expressions, reduce and lazy processing of data.”

Python’s a multi-paradigm language with incredible support for matrix operations and a wealth of open machine learning open source libraries.

I haven’t had an opportunity to dial-up the knobs and solve larger design problems in a pure functional style. I hope to do so soon. My current thinking about a pure functional style of programming is that it works well for streaming over large volumes of data. I’m not sure how it helps support quirky, ever-changing business rules and lots of behavioral variations based on system state. Reconciling my “go to” design approaches with new ways of working takes some mental lifting and initial discomfort. But when I do take the time to new design approaches, I have no doubt that I’ll find some new heuristics, polish existing ones and learn more about design in the process.

Nothing ever goes exactly by the book

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Rebecca

In Designing Object-Oriented Software, we used the design for an ATM (Automated Teller Machine) to illustrate how to design object-oriented software. We worked through a simplistic design for an ATM and produced a CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaborator) Card design.

Several years after our book was published I received an email from an instructor at a company. Although he liked our book, he felt he was missing something important about Responsibility-Driven Design. No matter how hard he tried, his students never exactly reproduced our design! And worse yet, in his opinion, all their designs were different.

I was astonished that he expected to teach principles, practices, and design thinking and then magically his students would produce identical designs. Our minds don’t work alike, so why should we produce identical designs?

A couple of years ago I received a gift of a Blue Apron subscription. For those who are not familiar with Blue Apron, you select the meals you want for a week, then along with the recipes they ship you a box of ingredients. All you add is your own salt and olive oil, cooking utensils, stove, and voila—you make a tasty dish.

The first meal I cooked was Za’atar-Roasted Broccoli Salad. The picture of the dish on the recipe card looked like this:
Recipe
And here’s a photo of the dish as I prepared it:
DishICooked
Not bad! But I didn’t blindly follow the recipe. I used my brain, my eyes, and my cooking sense, as well as past experiences, when making that dish.

If you look closely the recipe card below you’ll see that the instructions are not equally precise. While the eggs should be boiled for exactly 9 minutes, there’s more tolerance in the time to roast the broccoli. Just exactly how much is a drizzle? And that there are so many points during the recipe when you are asked to add salt! Over time (and following several recipes’ instructions too closely) I learned that if you added salt every time they advised you to, the meals would be too salty. Over time, Blue Apron has adjusted their recipes to not include so many salt instructions.

There is no substitute for learning from direct experience and observation. A beginning cook who expects to follow instructions exactly and get a well-made dish is bound to be frustrated.

And people who expect to follow someone else’s software design heuristics and end up with an optimal solution to their specific design problem will invariably be disappointed.

Sure, you may initially learn some design heuristics from a book or by reading code or from someone who is more senior or stack overflow or wherever. But never expect things to go exactly “by the book.” There are many details that experts never share that you’ll have to fill in. And don’t get frustrated when experts change their minds or design approaches or disagree (they do all the time). But don’t be silent, either, if you are puzzled or curious. Ask them about their thinking. They may have encountered an edge case or an exception to some “general” heuristic. Or there may have been more to the design problem than they had initially thought. By having that conversation you just might learn something from each other.

Writing, Remembering, and Sharing Design Heuristics

Posted on April 12, 2019 by Rebecca

I’ve been experimenting with simple ways to record software design heuristics. I want to find ways to vividly bring to mind the design heuristics I use or learn about from others. Ideally, any written heuristic should be shorter than a software pattern and somewhat more detailed and informative than a single pithy phrase.

There are three reasons it is important to physically write heuristics instead of just talking about them or clipping online sources into a note taking app:

1. Writing helps us remember the important bits
For a good overview of the benefits of notetaking, read this lifehack article by Dustin Wax. If nothing else this should inspire you to jot down and/or draw by hand the key bits of the next talk or lecture you listen to. What we write we remember.

2. Writing in longhand helps us process our experiences
Research shows that the act of writing in longhand is quite different than typing. This Medical Daily article by Lizette Borreli summarizes research into the memory boosting benefits of writing longhand:

“…writing by hand allows the brain to receive feedback from a person’s motor actions, and this specific feedback is different than those received when touching and typing on a keyboard… Overall, it seems those who type their notes may potentially be at risk for ‘mindless processing.’ The old fashioned note taking method of pen and paper boosts memory and the ability to understand concepts and facts.”

3. Written heuristics can be shared
Once you’ve written some tried and true heuristics in your own words, you can share them with others. Even better, use these heuristics to stimulate a deeper discussion into the design heuristic space you are exploring. Don’t shy away from discussions about nuances, counter-examples, edge cases, and competing heuristics (alternative ways to tackle a specific design problem). You may uncover a wealth of new heuristics to ponder and open up your mind to new ways of solving familiar problems.

If the person you are conversing with doesn’t know much about the topic area of your heuristics, the questions they ask will likely lead you to clarify your thinking (or at least improve your explanations). They won’t get what you are saying if you speak too much in shorthand. If they know more about the topic, you may have a lively conversation about heuristics and lessons they’ve learned over time. They may validate your heuristics as well as give you some new ideas.

A Simple Idea- QHE Cards
I’ve been playing around with using index cards as a means to quickly capture a heuristic. I structure a heuristic in three parts: a question, the answer (which can be then polished into a couple sentence heuristic), and an example or two to help me remember. I call them QHE (Question-Heuristic-Example) or “Q-Hee” cards, for lack of a better name. Using index cards to record design heuristics is inspired by CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaborators) cards invented by Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck and popularized in my first design book. I like index cards.

Here’s two QHE Cards describing heuristics found in a conversation with Mathias Verraes about designing event records:
AnnotatedQHECard 2019_04_12 2_03 PM Office Lens~2 (1)

QHE cards are simple to write. I don’t worry about precision or formality. With a little bit of effort I can turn a question and answer into a short heuristic statement. For example, here’s my first cut at a heuristic for what information to include in an event record:

Heuristic: Only include information necessary to “replay” an event and achieve the same results. Don’t include sensitive information or extra information simply because you think it might be useful.

An example or two to jog my memory is essential. And just like CRC cards, they can be too terse for others to understand (or to remember, if I wait too long). To make a heuristic memorable, I need to actively integrate that heuristic into my design heuristic gestalt. This is especially true if it is about a design topic I am not that familiar with.

To create a stronger memory and deeper understanding I can write more about the heuristic, sketch out a more detailed example, write some code, and/or draw a diagram…whatever it takes to go a bit deeper.

Heuristic gists are especially useful when you want to share heuristics with others. They may need a bit more context to understand what you mean. I like to write them in a form similar to pattern gists. Here’s an example of a pattern gist from Fearless Change Patterns by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising:
APatternGist

And here’s how I rewrote the QHE card for deciding when to generate different events from a process as a gist:

Multiple Events for a Single Process
You need to balance passing along information needed by downstream processes in a single business event with creating multiple event records, each designed to convey specific information needed by a specific downstream process.

Summary of Problem
How do you know how many events to generate for a single business process?

Summary of Solution
If different processes downstream react differently, generate different events. For example, handling a “rental car return” request might generate two events and event records: “car returned” and “mileage recorded.” Even though the mileage is recorded at the time a car is returned, mileage could be recorded at any other time as well. It is a cleaner design to generate two events, rather than cram information into a single, overloaded “car returned” event.

The act of writing a bit more detail in a gist often leads to further questions which lead to even more design heuristics. For example, these questions quickly come to mind: When is it OK to pass along extra information in an event? When is it not OK? What kinds of information should never be passed along in an event record? What happens if a new business process needs slightly different information?

And that’s the point. There are a myriad of details to work out for any real design. And many more heuristics for solving design problems and learning to live with their consequences. By writing down your heuristics, you’ll remember what you were thinking at the time. Note to future self: That effort just might be worth it!

What do typical design heuristics look like?

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Rebecca

In my previous post I introduced the topic of design heuristics. Billy Vaughn Koen, in Discussion of The Method: Conducting the Engineer’s Approach to Problem Solving, defines a heuristic as, “anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible.”

Common phrases that mean roughly the same thing as heuristic in English include “rule of thumb or “practical method” or “useful shortcut” or “approximation”. I don’t think approximation or shortcut convey the essence of what makes a heuristic handy or helpful. Wikipedia defines heuristic as, “any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.”

Heuristics describe practical actions or attitudes we take in order to make design progress. Billy gives several examples of general engineering heuristics in his book:
Billy'sHeuristics
Reading these heuristics you might think, “Ah, heuristics are merely simple statements of what to do.”

Although heuristics can be boiled down into pithy advice, e.g. “Do this…” or “Don’t do that…,” I find that there usually is a lot more behind any simple phrase. Ask any design expert about how to tackle a specific design problem and she’ll add caveats and constraints and assumptions. Her heuristics might sound more like, “Do this when…and… unless … and here’s how I might …”. Or, “Try this first…and then…until…”.

Which leads me to observe that written design patterns–specifically software design and architecture patterns–are a handy form for sharing meaty, complex, nuanced design heuristics with others.
PatternsAreHandy

Consider this summary of the pattern, Do a Mock Installation, from Object-Oriented Re-engineering Patterns that illustrates some of that extra useful stuff that can be explained by a pattern.

Pattern: Do a Mock Installation
Intent: Check whether you have the necessary artifacts available by installing the system and recompiling the code.
Problem: How can you be sure that you will be able to (re)build the system?
Difficulties:

The system is new to you, so you do not know which files you need.
The system may depend on libraries, frameworks, and patches, and you’re uncertain you have the right versions available.
The system is large and complex, and the exact configuration under which the system is supposed to run is unclear.
Maintainers may answer these questions, or you may find answers in documentation, but you still must verify whether this information is complete.

Solving this is feasible because:

You have access to the source code and the necessary build tools
You have the ability to reinstall the system in an environment that is similar to that of the running system
Maybe the system includes some kind of self-test

Solution: Try to install and build the system in a clean environment taking a limited amount of time (at most one day).
After the build prepare a report:

Version number of libraries, frameworks and patches used
Dependencies between the infrastructure
Problems you encountered and how you tried to solve them
Suggestions for improvement
Assessment of the situation including possible solutions/workarounds (if failed)

Tradeoffs:

Pros:
It is an essential prerequisite
Demands precision
Increases your credibility
Cons:
Tedious activity
No certainty
Difficulties: Easy to get carried away.

When written well, patterns include just the right amount of extra advice. Advice that a competent designer has gained through experience and reflections. Patterns can even warn us about potential roadblocks or advise us on what to try next if the pattern’s solution isn’t a good fit for our specific problem.

But in addition to those larger-grained design problems typical of patterns, there are many smaller design decisions and gnarly design details we have to deal with. And as experienced designers, we too, have heuristics for addressing them rattling around in our brains. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find easy ways (easier than writing patterns) to record and share our heuristics with each other?

Here’s a photo of some heuristic snippets captured in a one-day workshop I held at DDD Europe:
ExampleHeuristics
I’ve been experimenting with simple ways to record, share, and communicate design heuristics that require far less effort to create than full-fledged patterns yet convey more than can be shared on a sticky note. Somewhere between full-fledged written patterns and pithy phrases is a sweet spot I’m striving for. That’s topic of my next post.

Growing Your Personal Design Heuristics Toolkit

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Rebecca

Billy Vaughn Koen’s Discussion of The Method has had a profound influence on my thoughts about design. This book has inspired me to explore the role that software patterns play alongside other design heuristics and led me to muse about design uncertainty. I’ve been inspired to experiment with simple ways to capture design heuristics and I’ve spent time heuristics hunting with other designers.

In this blog post I’ll introduce you to Billy Vaughn Kohn’s ideas about problem solving and heuristics. Billy defines heuristic as

“anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible.”

There are no guarantees. Heuristics can fail. The tenacity that defines an engineer is when she steps back, regroups, and finds a different heuristic to try next. Another important thing to consider is that there are always competing heuristics to choose from. There simply isn’t a single right way to solve any complex design problem. Based on our assessment of the situation, our judgment, and the fit of the heuristics we know to the problem at hand, we decide what to do next. And when designers disagree, it may be because they are focusing on different aspects of the problem, or that they have a different collection of cherished heuristics in their toolkit (whether or not they can articulate them).

Courtesy of xkcd.com https://xkcd.com/309/

Billy describes three different type of heuristics:

1. Heuristics we use to solve a specific problem;

2. Heuristics that guide our use of other heuristics (meta-heuristics, if you will); and

3. Heuristics that determine our attitude and behavior towards design or the world and the way we work.

Let’s take a closer look at each type.

Heuristics we apply to solve a problem. For example, in his book, Billy gives several examples of general engineering heuristics: Heuristic: Always be prepared to give an answer (and when you need to give an answer, use the best approach you know for figuring out that answer based on the time constraints and resources you have at hand). As an example, imagine the approach you might take for determining the number of Ping-Pong balls that fill up a room if you had to give an answer in 2 seconds. What if you had 2 minutes, an hour, or a week to come up with an answer? Would your approaches differ?

Heuristic: Use feedback to stabilize your design. Billy Vaughn Koen is a Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Physics as well as a philosopher of engineering. He taught people who designed nuclear reactors. I’m glad he taught them about the importance of feedback loops to verify design assumptions. And that is one reason why frequent delivery of software, retrospectives, and reviews are valued activities in agile development.

And oh yes, one last heuristic: Always give yourself a chance to retreat. Backing out of a half-baked or unworkable design is important if you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner.

As software designers we have many heuristics in our toolkit. If we know about design patterns, we use them. If we’ve built high-performance systems, we may have a wealth of heuristics for tuning cache performance. If we are familiar with Domain Driven Design concepts, our preferred way to structure a complex system is by identifying bounded contexts. For those unfamiliar with Domain Driven Design, a bounded context might be considered to be roughly equivalent to a subsystem or subdomain. The distinguishing characteristic of a bounded context is that within it there is a consistent, single, unambiguous meaning for business concepts and events. And we may visualize event flows and relationships between bounded contexts by drawing a context map.

Heuristics that guide our use of other heuristics. These heuristics tell us what to try next. The best examples I know of these heuristics are in Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns. Each chapter in this book is a small pattern language, describing a rough sequence of actions for solving a particular system-reengineering goal. For example, chapter 3 is a pattern language for making “first contact” with a legacy system. Based on what you have just learned, the language spells out options for what to explore next.

First contact design pattern language

Heuristics that determine our attitude and behavior. Agile software designers value frequent feedback. That’s the premise behind frequently deploying working software in order to have its functionality exercised by actual customers. And one heuristic for reducing the risk of downtime when frequently deploying software is to use a blue/green deployment environment.

While we may have learned design patterns (or other published patterns, for that matter) by reading about them, most nitty-gritty design heuristics come from on-the-job experience. We learn a lot by living with the myriad design choices we make (and revisit) as our system’s functionality grows. We learn even more as we support a system over its lifetime. Our heuristics are shaped not only by the kinds of software systems we have designed, built, and maintained but also by the design culture at our places of work.

How do we improve as designers? Through designing and building software. By reflecting on that experience. And by polishing and refining our heuristics and sharing our cherished heuristics with each other.

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