Avoiding Over and Under Design
ÜberConf
Denver · July 16 - 19, 2013
About this Presentation
The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one. Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted work. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort. How can we know what the right balance is? Alan Shalloway shows how to use the advice from Design Patterns coupled with the attitude of not building what you don’t need from Agile. The trick is in observing potential variation, how it may affect you, and then how to isolate these risks in a simple manner.
Alan describes the essence of emergent design – that is, starting with a simple design and letting it evolve as the requirements evolve. He also demonstrates how to refactor to better designs and how this is different from refactoring bad code.

Lead Author of Design Patterns Explained, Essential Skills for Agile Developer
Al Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With over 40 years of experience, Al is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. Al is a SAFe Program Consultant as well as a certified Kanban instructor by the Lean Kanban University. Al has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped Net Objectives' clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility and Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Al has worked in literally dozens of industries over his career. He is a co-founder and board member for the Lean Software and Systems Consortium. He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University.