DM speculative design; was: Re: [AM] Unfounded assertion

(responding to J.B.)

>> (Dagna)
>> But we can (or, at least, I 
>> can, and I don't think I am that unusual!) work out that if a field is 
>> made up of compound data (like initials + surname, or quantity 
>> multiplied by price to give net value), then someone is going to 
>> look at  it and want to get at the elements. (The price per unit.)
>
> (J.B.)
> On this the Agile community and those generally outside the
> Agile community disagree and will likely always disagree. One
> of the fundamental differences between Agile practitioners and
> everyone else /seems to be/ that Agile practitioners treat
> speculative design as a liability, whereas others treat
> speculative design as an asset.

The important thing to know is that both these viewpoints are
rules of thumb based on the relative costs and benefits of
speculative design.  We reach different conclusions because
our approaches give different breakdowns of cost, thus
different cost-benefit balances.  This is important because
the rule of thumb will not necessarily apply in different
conditions.  Of course, this last observation is also important,
because it implies that if we want the rule of thumb to apply,
we need to change the conditions in which we work.

Agile approaches understand the benefit of not having to do
speculative design, and have ensured the cost of deferring
design until it is *not* speculative is reasonably low - in an
agile 3GL programming environment.  We have not done that 
yet for a Data Management environment.


Paul Oldfield

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any opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of
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