Incremental Design and Architecture
Note
Programmers
We deliver stories every week without compromising design quality.
XP makes challenging demands of its programmers: every week, programmers should finish 4 to 10 customer-valued stories. Every week, customers may revise the current plan and introduce entirely new stories—with no advance notice. This regimen starts with the first week of the project.
In other words, as a programmer you must be able to produce customer value, from scratch, in a single week. No advance preparation is possible. You can’t set aside several weeks for building a domain model or persistence framework; your customers need you to deliver completed stories.
Fortunately, XP provides a solution for this dilemma: incremental design (also called evolutionary design) allows you to build technical infrastructure (such as domain models and persistence frameworks) incrementally, in small pieces, as you deliver stories.
How It Works
Important
Incremental design applies the concepts introduced in test-driven development to all levels of design. Like test-driven development, programmers work in small steps, proving each before moving to the next. This takes place in three parts: start by creating the simplest design that could possibly work, incrementally add to it as the needs of the software evolve, and continuously improve the design by reflecting on its strengths and weaknesses.
Important
To be specific, when ...
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