Incremental Design

Last Saturday (May 7), I took part in Design Workshop, conducted by ThoughtWorks Chennai division.

Theme of the workshop was "Incremental Design", which is considered as the chance to validate the participant's software design/coding skills.  This session was hosted by GM Sivsu with around 100 coding participants.

Over a period of 4 hours, the participants found out how Incremental Design works by solving the given Retail use case.  It is allowed to have either pair with a fellow participant or work solo on a given problem statement in any programming language of your choice.  A series of check points during the course of the workshop will ensure that we pause, observe and learn to design the right way.

Personally, I learnt the below Top 5 key items on solving the given problem statement.
1. Understanding the User
2. Functional Coverage
3. Stability
4. Defining Core features
5. Extension

1. Understanding the User
Usually Personas are created and validated through User Research in the field.

2. Functional Coverage
Functionality is covered with the basic/strong test cases and the matching result set.

3. Stability
At any point of failure cases, App should be stable with graceful way of exit/error.

4. Defining Core features
Inevitably when building a product, teams are constrained by time, money, resources, etc and can’t build everything they want to at once. At the end of the workshop the solutions are compared with the different feature ideas they had come up with, to select the best.

5. Extension
As the core theme of Incremental design, the later change requests should be adoptable to extend further.

With the interesting hands-on mode of learning, signing off this week activity.