Evolutionary design, continuous design, evolutive design, incremental design or evolutionary architecture is directly related to any modular design application, in which components can be freely substituted to improve the design, modify performance, or change another feature at a later time.
Software architect
A software architect is a software engineer responsible for high-level design choices related to overall system structure and behavior.
It's software architect's responsibility to match architectural characteristics (aka non-functional requirem ...
s and
software developers
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming.
The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...
should use "
fitness functions" to continuously keep the software system in check. According to Neal Ford, evolutionary architecture delays decisions until the "last responsible moment." That moment can be identified with fast feedback loops and guiding fitness functions.
According to Neal Ford, evolutionary architecture adopts "Bring the pain forward," tackling tough tasks early, fostering automation and swift issue detection.
Informatics
In particular, it applies (with the name continuous design) to
software development
Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...
. In this field it is a practice of creating and modifying the design of a system as it is developed, rather than purporting to specify the system completely before development starts (as in the
waterfall model
The waterfall model is a breakdown of developmental activities into linear sequential phases, meaning that each phase is passed down onto each other, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a speciali ...
). Continuous design was popularized by
extreme programming
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, ...
. Continuous design also uses
test driven development
Test-driven development (TDD) is a way of writing code that involves writing an automated unit-level test case that fails, then writing just enough code to make the test pass, then refactoring both the test code and the production code, then rep ...
and
refactoring
In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing source code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structure, ...
.
Martin Fowler wrote a popular book called ''Refactoring'', as well as a popular article entitled "Is Design Dead?", that talked about continuous/evolutionary design.
James Shore wrote an article in IEEE titled "Continuous Design".
Industrial design Project
Modular design
Modular design, or modularity in design, is a design principle that subdivides a system into smaller parts called ''modules'' (such as modular process skids), which can be independently created, modified, replaced, or exchanged with other modules ...
states that a product is made of subsystems that are joined together to create a full product. The above design model defined in electronics and evolved in industrial design into well consolidated industrial standards related to platform concept and its evolution.
[Muffatto M (1999) Platform strategies in international new product development. Int J Opera Prod Manag 19(5/6):449–460. doi:10.1108/01443579910260766]
See also
*
Rapid application development
Rapid application development (RAD), also called rapid application building (RAB), is both a general term for adaptive software development approaches, and the name for James Martin's method of rapid development. In general, RAD approaches to ...
*
Continuous integration
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of integrating source code changes frequently and ensuring that the integrated codebase is in a workable state.
Typically, developers Merge (version control), merge changes to an Branching (revisio ...
*
Evolutionary database design
References
External links
Is Design Dead?
Software design
{{Soft-eng-stub