Design and Reality

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Design and Reality, by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Mathias Verraes, is a collection of essays about the challenges when creating and using models in software design.

What one reviewer says about this book:

“These essays from Mathias and Rebecca offer software creators a fast track to making an impact with their craft. Through well-curated real-world modelling stories, you get to appreciate the art of discovering powerful abstractions, that capture the soul of core domains, while freeing up cognitive capacity for crunching more complexity. Through design heuristics backed by examples, you learn how to evaluate yours and others’ models to guide software and organisational design decisions. You will be more confident in software designers’ superpower to not only model reality, but also give form to a changed reality.”
—Xin Yao

This book collects these software design essays:

• Design and Reality: Reframing the problem through design.
• Models and Metaphors: When a complex technical domain isn’t easily captured in a model, look for metaphors that bring clarity.
• Critically Engaging With Models: Our worldviews are grown from other people’s models. How do we control what models we let in?
• Splitting a Domain Across Multiple Bounded Contexts: How designing for business opportunities and the rate of change may give you better contexts.
• Surfacing Worldviews in Design: Implicit worldviews underlie our design choices. Exposing them can generate better options.
• Critical Software Redesign: Creating the Environment for Large Scale Change:There’s a moment where it’s too soon to invest in a radical new software design for your system. And then you reach a moment where it’s too late, too expensive to change it. How can you find the sweet spot?

More essays may be added from time to time.