Big Design, But Not All Upfront

When not ranting and raving on this blawg about "great injustices" (LOL) that I perceive are keeping the world from becoming a better place, I design, write, and test radar system software for a living. I use the BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER coding to capture, expose, and reason about my software designs. The UML artifacts I concoct serve as a high level coding road map for me; and a communication tool for subject matter experts (in my case, radar system engineers) who don't know how to (or care to) read C++ code but are keenly interested in how I map their domain-specific requirements/designs into an implementable software design.



I'm not a UML language lawyer and I never intend to be one. Luckily, I'm not forced to use a formal UML-centric tool to generate/evolve my "bent" UML designs (see what I mean by "bent" UML here: ). I simply use MSFT Visio to FREELY splat symbols and connections on an e-canvas in any way I see fit. Thus, I'm unencumbered by a nanny tool telling me I'm syntactically/semantically "wrong!" and rudely interrupting my thought flow every five minutes.




The 2nd graphic below illustrates an example of one of my typical class diagrams. It models a small, logically cohesive cluster of cooperating classes that represent the "transmit timeline" functionality embedded within a larger "scheduler" component. The scheduler component itself is embedded within yet another, larger scale component composed of a complex amalgam of cooperating hardware and software components; the radar itself.



When fully developed and tested, the radar will be fielded within a hostile environment where it will (hopefully) perform its noble mission of detecting and tracking aircraft in the midst of random noise, unwanted clutter reflections, cleverly uncooperative "enemy" pilots, and atmospheric attenuation/distortion. But I digress, so let me get back to the original intent of this post, which I think has something to do with how and why I use the UML.



The radar transmit timeline is where other necessarily closely coupled scheduler sub-components add/insert commands that tell the radar hardware what to do and when to do it; sometime in the future relative to "now". As the radar rotates and fires its sophisticated, radio frequency pulse trains out into the ether looking for targets, the scheduler is always "thinking" a few steps ahead of where the antenna beam is currently pointing. The scheduler relentlessly fills the TxTimeline in real time with beam-specific commands. It issues those commands to the hardware early enough for the hardware to be able to queue, setup, and execute the minute transmit details when the antenna arrives at the desired command point. Geeze! I'm digressing yet again off the UML path, so lemme try once more to get back to what I originally wanted to ramble about.



Being an unapologetic UML bender, and not a fan of analysis-paralysis, I never attempt to meticulously show every class attribute, operation, or association on a design diagram. I weave in non-UML symbology as I see fit and I show only those elements I deem important for creating A SHARED UNDERSTANDING between myself and other interested parties. After all, some low level attributes/operations/classes/associations will "go away" as my learning unfolds and others will "emerge" during coding anyway, so why waste the time?



Notice the "revision number" in the lower right hand corner of the above . It hints that I continuously keep the diagram in sync with the code as I write it. In fact, I keep the applicable diagram(s) open right next to my code editor as I hack away. As a , I bounce back and forth between code & UML artifacts whenever I want to.



The UML below depicts a visualization of the participatory role of the TxTimeline object in a larger system context comprised ofother peer objects within the scheduler. For fear of unethically disclosing intellectual property, I'm not gonna walk through a textual explanation of the operational behavior of the scheduler component as "a whole". The purpose of presenting the sequence diagram is simply to show you a REAL case example that "one diagram is not enough" for me to capture the design of any software component containing a substantial amount of "essential complexity". As a matter of fact, at this current moment in time, I have generated a set of 7+ leveled and balanced class/sequence/activity diagrams to steer my coding effort. I always start coding/testing with class skeletons and I iteratively add muscles/tendons/ligaments/organs to the Frankensteinian beast over time.



In this post, I opened up my trench coat and showed you my attempted to share with you an intimate glimpse into the way I personally design & develop software. In my process, the design is not done "all upfront", but a purely subjective mix of mostly high and low level details is indeed created upfront. I think of it as "Big Design, But Not All Upfront".



Despite what some code-centric, design-agnostic, software development processes advocate, in my mind, it's not just about the code. The code is simply the lowest level, most concrete, model of the solution. The practices of design generation/capture and code slinging/testing in my world are intimately and inextricably coupled. I'm not smart enough to go directly to code from a user story, a one-liner work backlog entry, a whiteboard doodle, or a set of casual, undocumented, face-to-face conversations. In my domain, real-time surveillance , expressing and capturing a fair amount of formal detail is (rightly) required up front. So, screw you to any and allNoUML, no-documentation, jihadists who happen to stumble upon this post.
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