sinking castles

David Chelimsky — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:54:11 +0000

I recently heard it suggested that large scale software projects should be built 3 times before releasing them:

once to prototype
once to prove out design
once with the intent of release.

Today I heard this quote from Monty Python:

“I built a castle in the swamp and it sunk. I built a second castle and it sunk too. I built a third castle and it burned down and then sunk. But the fourth castle, Ahhhh! That one stood.”

Maybe they were on to something…

"sinking castles" by Esko Luontola

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 13:51:58 +0000

IMHO, all software projects (with an user interface) should first be built as a paper prototype, which would then be tested to verify that all the users’ tasks can be accomplished with the program effectively. In other words, acceptance testing will be done before a single line of code is written.

The process in TDD terminology:

find goal-based use cases based on the user’s workflow (TDD: write unit tests)
design a user interface with which the goal-based use cases can be completed (TDD: write code for unit tests)
test that the use cases can be completed effectively (TDD: run unit tests)
refactor the user interface to be more effective and clean (TDD: refactor the code to make it cleaner)
return to any of the previous steps until the design is complete (TDD: iterative development)
proceed to the implementation phase

For more information: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/papers/GUIDe.html

Object Mentor Blog: sinking castles

sinking castles

"sinking castles" by Esko Luontola