Xebia Blog

Sometimes back there was an interesting debate between Agile manifesto founder member Bob Martin and renowned Jim Coplien about the relevance of good design principles in TDD based development.

Jim had very thought provoking views about what people do in the name of TDD and when it leads to something where it's just impossible to do any kind of refactoring further as there was no overall sound design/architecture base.

It leads to following questions:

• While practicing TDD and Scrum, is it really possible to focus on a good design considering we just focus on the prioritized list of requirements and don’t really see their interactions with other user stories to begin with?
• Without having a big picture in shape of logical diagram, class diagrams (read UML), deployment diagrams, is it really possible to create a good architecture/design? May be it’s possible in small scale projects where the level of complexity in terms of business logic is not too high. But the question is more relevant for big projects (1-2 million LOC).

There were some interesting follow up in this respect from various people in Xebia. I thought it'll be a good idea to combine all those thoughts through this blog.

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Filed under: Agile, Architecture, TDD
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