Designing to an Interface
So, we are in a waterfall cycle. We are attempting to fit in ‘agile’ like pieces where possible. The largest so far is the use of Spring as the overall platform with a version of Faces on the front end. Really pretty cool stuff.
We are in ‘detail design’. Remember that from CS101 as part of Top-Down Design Principles? I had expected pseduo-code or similar for the messier, logic intensive components. Wrong!
We have spent, as a team, a good part of this phase determining how to get the product to work within the framework. The real detailed design pieces have not been done in lieu of figuring that out.
Also, we get a physical data model in this phase. Only, then we can determine what entities are available and start to use them in a design. Wow! This stuff is a never ending surprise.
I guess it had to be done anyway, but how does someone start coding in the next phase when there are no details?