Concerned about design
I have encountered today some information about a company that concerns me. Normally I do not care what happens in another company but because they deal with our money and our lives in some sort I could not neglect it.
Design in software is important if you want to communicate your ideas or features to other parties in the project team (I do not want to use the word stakeholder as it is being misused). You find a language to communicate. Either a picture language (UML, BPMN, …) or by using some sort of code (AADL, Pseudocode, …). I have seen features being explained in a Word document and as our human languages are not watertight it gave too much room for misinterpretation. UML works great to explain something. If you use it as a toolbox and do not hesitate to use pseudocode to explain the details you get far. It is not 100% watertight and you need to have write your own guidelines. All UML examples on the web use silly examples that you cannot use in your professional design. Even the books use stupid examples that are not even close to real life. Result is that every company you go you get another interpretation on UML with or without guidelines on how exactly it can be used. It can be a mess and a huge implementation cost. So design gets neglected and you know the consequences.
The same flow happens with the design tool we are using. The design tool I use is Enterprise Architect from Sparx. In my humble opinion the best on the market. And that is only because you can organize your design. The drawing tool is bad. The presentation capabilities are bad. So again you need guidelines for that too. The toll you pay for the freedom you get. I do not know if that freedom is what we want.
The other tool I use is Visio from Microsoft. The organization capabilities are bad. Not as complete as it has to be. You need to build yourself a lot of stuff before you can truely work. But the drawing and presentation features are awesome.
What I need is a tool that combines the best of Enterprise Architect and Visio with an extensibility framework/api/hook. Besides that it needs to have a guiding workflow system inside of it so every team member does not need to read a guideline document that is prone for misinterpretation.
So what about the concerns you are having? Well that financial company struggles with that. Now. Today. Even they do not have any guidelines that matter. It concerns me that they do not have a proper way to design their software and be organized. SCRUM is not the answer. Believe me.
They need that software design tool as I do and probably more people.
Who is going to build that? I want too. And if I ever do have the time to start with it, I will make it opensource. Or does it exist already? I would like to know.
