Six weeks ago or so, our development team reviewed a small design change in the way status is managed by an object. Basically, we broke one state variable into four, and thought more carefully about the state transitions allowed and expected for the class in question.
Yesterday, one of our analysts, at the prompting of one of our developers and two of our data designers, reviewed a completely new take on the same design change... none of the guys in question knew about the previous design change (they'd missed the design review). We ended up going with the previously-reviewed design.
The whole meeting and the thought that led up to it could have been avoided if there had been some mechanism for ensuring the approved design was implemented. This bit of design, like all design, is pretty much wasted if it remains in design documents.
One way to handle this would have been to somehow automatically compare the existing design artifacts to the implementation to see if they matched, and complain if they didn't. Even if we didn't implement the approved design right away, then, there'd be a mechanism for reminding developers that they planned to do something one way, and haven't made it happen yet.
Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Fossil
2 days ago