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1/9 Software design is invisible design. Its primary audience is the other designers.
2/9 Decision makers are used to design being something that produces visible outcomes: things, UIs, features, experiences. It's very hard for them to understand why they should care about software design.
3/9 But make no mistake: software design does impact users. If the software's model is congruent to the domain, it will help solve the users' problems, as oppose to generate more problems. It will lower communication cost about the system, and therefore enable speed.
4/9 In fact, I often define software quality as "that which enables speed in the long term". Many principles in software design can be seen in that light. eg Single Responsibility: speed up by having less cognitive overhead and risk under changing requirements.
5/9 Quality software isn't more expensive, it's cheaper (in the long term). Because if it's not cheaper, it's not quality software.
6/9 And that's the second thing decision makers are not used to: well-designed things in the physical world are usually more expensive. A well-designed thing is more expensive because we value it more.
7/9 I don't have a remedy, except to explain this over and over to decision makers. Which is why you should send @martinfowler's article to everybody in your org who can read. martinfowler.com/articles/is-qu…
8/9 The tl;dr for Fowler's article: "Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?" is the wrong question, because high quality software is cheaper to produce.
