Designing Software in the Large

I found "A philosophy of software design" to be a well intended but somewhat frustrating book to read.

It seemingly develops a theory of software architecture that is getting at some reasonable stuff, but does so without any reference _at all_ to the already rich theories for describing and modeling things.

I find software design highly related to scientific theory development and modeling, and related to mathematical theories like model theory, which give precise accounts of what it means to describe something.

Just taking the notion of "complexity". Reducing that to _just_ cognitive load seems to be a very poor analysis, when simple/complex ought to deal with the "size" of a structure, not how easy it is to understand.

The result of this poor theoretical grounding is that what the author of A Philosophy of Software Design presents feels very ad-hoc to me, and I feel like the summary presented in this article similarly feels ad-hoc.

That's very interesting. Can you recommended any resources for learning more about this?

Also, have you considered writing on this subject yourself? I get the feeling that your perspective here would be valuable to others.

I haven't read it myself but I probably will because I have a lot of hope for this topic (there must be a better way to do this!)

I worry that it doesn't much matter if it's perfect or mediocre, though, because there's a huge contingent of project managers who mock _any_ efforts to improve code and refuse to even acknowledge that there's any point to doing so - and they're still the ones running the asylum.

I'm very mathematically inclined, so I would probably want a "proper" treatment of this subject to include both formal logic, set theory, type theory and model theory, but they're also subjects I'm still familiarizing myself with.

My basic pitch is that, to a large degree writing sensible computer programs is about modeling some real life activity that the computer program will be part of, and describing things accurately has been done in other fields than programming for many hundreds if not thousands of years, so there's a deep well to draw from.

Despite my appetite for a dry and mathematical treatment of writing computer programs, I still think the book is good for what it is. I think I would go easier on the book if it were not for the title, because philosophy is precisely one of those subjects that tend to favor being very precise about things, something I distinctly think the book lacks. What the book is, however, is an excellent _sketch_ on what we'd want out of program design. I definitely agree about the author's notion of "deep modules" being desirable.

Project managers shouldn't be running engineering. They are there to keep the trains running on time, not to design the track, trains and stations.

The generally accepted roles are Product decides what we need to build, Design decides how it should work from user perspective, Engineering decides how to build it at a reasonable upfront and maintenance cost. This involves a fair amount of influence, because Engineering is better equipped to describe the cost tradeoffs than any other function. Of course this comes with the responsibility of understanding the big picture and where the business wants to go. IMHO you should not be speaking to project management about code quality, you should maintain ground level quality as you go, for bigger refactoring/cleanup this needs to be presented to Product leadership (not project managers) in terms of shoring up essential product complexity so it's easier for customers to use, less support, and simpler foundation for the next wave of features. Never talk about code with non-technical stakeholders.