[Via Gary]: An interview with Martin Fowler on Evolutionary Design. Excerpt:

With evolutionary design, you expect the design to evolve slowly over the course of the programming exercise. There's no design at the beginning. You begin by coding a small amount of functionality, adding more functionality, and letting the design shift and shape.
[...] most people have encountered evolutionary design in an unconstrained and ill-disciplined environment and it doesn't work. You end up with a crappy design. And that's one reason why people gravitate towards planned design.
But [...] extreme programming's practices of continuous integration, testing, and refactoring actually make evolutionary design work, and more effectively than planned design. Planned design's weakness is that creating a well-planned design is actually really tough.

Exactly. And speaking of evolutionary design, alpha-1.5 of spaces is now available for download. :)

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on November 28 2002 at 2:18 AM