Software People Inspiring

Gorman's Law of Tacit Architecture

Nat Pryce recently posted his collection of laws of software development, and well worth a read it is, too.

I have my own law to add, of course:

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GORMAN'S LAW OF TACIT ARCHITECTURE

The cumulative effect on system quality of all the low-level design decisions that are never planned or explicitly communicated vastly outweighs the effect of all the planned, documented design decisions.

These hidden, unspoken design decisions exert their own gravitational pull on system quality that often comes as a total surprise to architects who tend to only take their high-level architectural models into account when assessing quality. In that respect, they're a lot like dark matter.

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I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that an MVC implementation, for example, has a "clean separation of concerns" only to discover through basic dependency analysis that the M, the V and the C are so tightly coupled people are beginning to talk.

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