How to Write an Effective Software Design Document(refactoringenglish.com)
refactoringenglish.com
How to Write an Effective Software Design Document
https://refactoringenglish.com/excerpts/write-an-effective-design-doc/
8 comments
Should permission handling, battery optimization, and foreground service behavior be included in the design doc or left to implementation?
How should you document Android-version-specific behavior (Android 6–16) without making the document difficult to read?
The example app is making me upset... Instagram redux? Why
It's for private photo sharing with family or close friends. It's more like an open-source, self-hostable TinyBeans or PhotoCircle. I explain the motivation more in the design doc:
https://refactoringenglish.com/excerpts/write-an-effective-d...
https://refactoringenglish.com/excerpts/write-an-effective-d...
wouldn't these small groups just like... send an email? group chat?
The target audience of the app is me and my wife. This is a "home-cooked meal" app.[0] If it's useful to other people, I'm glad, but I'm primarily building it for myself for the pleasure of building and the satisfaction of a tool that works exactly how I want it to work.
You could approximate it with email, but I want things that you can't do with email like letting recipients control the frequency of emails, making high-res images available without bloating everyone's inboxes.
[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
You could approximate it with email, but I want things that you can't do with email like letting recipients control the frequency of emails, making high-res images available without bloating everyone's inboxes.
[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
The "what's the penalty for being wrong" question is the part I'd keep. That one works at any scale.
But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving. The decisions that ended up mattering weren't ones I could have named on day one, they were things I cut in year three once I actually understood what the app was for. If I'd written the objective sentence up front I'd have locked in a version that turned out wrong. The clarity came from building the thing, not from describing it first.
For coordinating people or catching a security flaw before it ships, sure, all of this makes sense. Solo just runs on different rules I guess.
But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving. The decisions that ended up mattering weren't ones I could have named on day one, they were things I cut in year three once I actually understood what the app was for. If I'd written the objective sentence up front I'd have locked in a version that turned out wrong. The clarity came from building the thing, not from describing it first.
For coordinating people or catching a security flaw before it ships, sure, all of this makes sense. Solo just runs on different rules I guess.
Thanks for reading!
>But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving.
Yeah, I agree that for solo projects, it makes sense to greatly scale down the design phase. In a lot of cases, you'd scale design down to zero if you need user feedback to figure out what to build.
But even for solo projects, if I keep at it for months or years, I eventually get to the point where some problem is hard enough that I need to do some upfront design, even if it's not as formal as a whole design doc.
>But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving.
Yeah, I agree that for solo projects, it makes sense to greatly scale down the design phase. In a lot of cases, you'd scale design down to zero if you need user feedback to figure out what to build.
But even for solo projects, if I keep at it for months or years, I eventually get to the point where some problem is hard enough that I need to do some upfront design, even if it's not as formal as a whole design doc.