The Great Debate: Patterns vs Tooling

re: The Great Debate: Patterns vs Tooling

David V. Corbin — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:07:41 GMT

Jason, et.al.

REALLY sorry that I missed that discussion (Alas I was not able to get away to be as the Summit). I have to chime in that I firmly believe that Patterns in (well written) Narative Form are critical.

Without this initial phase (i.e. prior to the patterns being implemented in tooling), it is virtually impossible to evaliate their merit and perhaps most importantly their potential interactions with other patterns.

As a consulting architect, I do agree that it is sometimes difficult to convince a team of the importance of understanding Patterns (not just "What", but "Why". This "WHY" part is no possible if the pattern is simply embbedded in tooling.

Keep up the great work. I have nearly the entire P&P book library (in well worn condition) and typically have my clients get them as well.

Sincerely,

David V. Corbin

President / Chief Architect

Dynamic Concepts Development Corp.

New York, NY

Patterns vs. Tooling

J.D. Meier's Blog — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:17:11 GMT

I'm a fan of patterns. I think of patterns simply as problem and solution pairs. I wandered by The Hogg

re: The Great Debate: Patterns vs Tooling

J. Schuetze — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:48:19 GMT

First off, shame on the guy who started shooting you in the head every time you opened your mouth to speak.

There was some good discussion during this session, and ultimately I ended up more torn between the two sides than I started. I like the idea of embedding the patterns in the tools, but I think there are several downsides, and for that reason I was initially against doing it to any great degree. There was one example Dragos used of his child putting the keyboard on auto-play, and not learning anything about how to play by doing so. There was some strong reaction to that, but what I didn't get a chance to say was that it goes beyond the child's lack of learning. If a child picks a certain background track to play with, there's only an aesthetic impact on the result, if a developer or designer picks the wrong design pattern there may be a HUGE impact. Tell someone to pound in a nail and give him a toolbox of heavy tools he doesn't know how to use properly, and he'll beat the nail in with the first Pounder he finds.

This really is the downside of patterns in tooling, as far as I'm concerned. You give someone a toolbox of very powerful (and dangerous!) tools and people will get hurt. It's not unlike if I were to sell dynamite with nothing other than an admonition to "be careful!". There's a reason the average joe can't just go buy dynamite.

I liked your idea, at the end of the session, of having a way to hook patterns into the tooling more easily. Your comments were short, and we were running out of time, but ultimately I envisioned something like a way to plug in patterns to VSTS as they were added to some kind of public repository, and personally I also envisioned something along the lines of a menu item or wizard that would take you to the website, explain the pattern, then have a 'click here to use this pattern' type of feature which would create the stubbed classes for the developer. It could even be setup to only do the explanation/overview on the first use of the pattern.

re: The Great Debate: Patterns vs Tooling

Jason Hogg — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:43:41 GMT

The guy with the gun was kind of annoying - but our greatest fear was that the event might end up making us look like academics sitting in an ivory tower - so the guns were meant to be used as a means of grounding us!

Myself and Dragos were given the role that could have made us out to be academics, which is why I tried to focus on the importance of continuing to support the narrative form - regardless of how the patterns are then used.

I understand the points you are making about people getting hurt. Our intent with the factories was that there would be an evaluation phase where an enterprise architect / lead developer would review the solution and customize it according to their organizations requirements. Since I left P&P I do not have data on whether that happens or not.

Another interesting point to consider would be - which is worse:

a. An application with no architecture,

b. An application that is over-engineered for a specific instance of that application type

c. An application using patterns that have been mis-applied...

thoughts?

re: The Great Debate: Patterns vs Tooling

Frank — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:31:05 GMT

Hi all, I'm a solution architect from China. I found this topic very interesting and I want to share you with my thoughts.

My opinion is that the development of patterns and tools are independent from each other.For different people, there might be different concerns.

As you all know, China is becoming the biggist ODC market for outsourcing projects coming from all over the world. I most of the outsourcing companies here, productivity is the most important. The employer need their projects be well and quickly maked.They don't care too much about whether their developers had learned or not the design patterns from the projects, because they are concerning about the profits. For sure they prefer well decorated tools. On the other hand, the developers need to learn patterns well in the first place because this increases their personal values a lot in their career life, and could help them to find better paid jobs in the future.

So if this debate takes place in China, I think most of the employers will stand on the bule corner while the employees stand on the red corner.