Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

What makes an agile designer effective? Agile designers need to quickly see the essence of a problem, shape reasonable solutions, and communicate complex ideas. When things don't exactly go according to plan, they must react, readjust their thinking, and try again. This presentation introduces several techniques and vocabulary for articulating the nature of design problems and their solutions: Problem frames identify the 'typical structure' of software tasks. Designer stories set the stage for collaborative design. Role stereotypes are useful for assigning or assessing object behaviors. Control styles can help characterize and communicate control center designs. Trust regions can aid in spotting places where 'defensive' programming is needed.

Seasoned designers strike a balance. They know the difference between core and revealing design tasks and plan accordingly. When unanticipated difficulties crop, they adapt their work rhythms. Finally, we conclude by introducing different forms of criticism and how to handle them on the spot so you can hold your own and even learn something instead of having a heated discussion.

Audience: Developers, programmers, leads, and testers can benefit from learning how to characterize problems and solutions. Participants should be familiar with software programming, agile development, and object design, and be looking for new ways of 'seeing'.

Do you have trouble communicating design ideas, getting buy-in to new approaches, or informing others about your design? The best way to present your design isn’t the same way you came up with it. As Francis Galton, a 19th century geneticist remarked, “It often happens that after being hard at work, and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual place. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them.” This course presents tips, techniques, and guidelines for communicating your designs to others. To be an effective communicator, you need to know what belongs together and what deserves special emphasis. By choosing what to emphasize, understanding what's fundamental, and using progressive realization techniques, you can unfold a design in successively interesting parts. In this short course we'll present options for drawing and explaining your design using informal as well as formal notation. We’ll demonstrate some fun ways to get people to simulate object interactions by tossing koosh balls, and we'll have time to plot out your own design storyline.

Topics:
I. Why tell design stories?
II. A story-telling strategy
    a. Stories worth telling
    b. A presentation planning “template”
    c. Understand the needs and concerns of your audience
d. Story considerations for presenting an architecture
    e. Early design stories
III. Storytelling basics
a. An ordering of story fundamentals: from most to least fundamental
b. Use progressive realization
c. Decide what to emphasize and understand visual impact   
IV. Storytelling dilemmas
    a. The crowd
    b. The impatient audience
    c. Massive details
    d. Missing details
    e. How to solicit and handle criticism
V. Storytelling patterns
    a. Describing exception handling
b. Describing how to adapt a design
c. Describing design decisions
VI. Elements of Style
    a. Strunk and White’s advice applied to design stories
    b. Representation options—formal, informal, detailed, overview

Tutorial Objectives
At the completion of this course attendees should be able to:
•    Plot a design story
•    Use techniques to increase emphasis
•    Order a story’s topics from most to least fundamental
•    Choose an ordering to tell a story based on the audience and context
•    Determine an appropriate storytelling strategy and format