Design Visualization: Smoke and Mirrors (slides)

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Design Visualization: Smoke and Mirrors
Ruth Malan

Imagine this slide is
M.C. Escher’s Day and Night

Where To
• Architecture
• Visual (in) Design
• Design Intention:Reflection

Smoke (Intention) and
Mirrors (Reflection)

Intention:Reflection
• INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence
of one set of influences over another set; an effect
whose cause is the imminence, immediate or
remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.
• REFLECTION, n. An action of the mind whereby we
obtain a clearer view of our relation to the things of
yesterday and are able to avoid the perils that we
shall not again encounter.
• Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Source: Devil’s Dictionary

Architecture: W(h)at?
Software architecture refers to the high level
structures of a software system, the discipline of
creating such structures, and the documentation of
these structures. It is the set of structures needed to
reason about the software system. Each structure
comprises software elements, relations among them,
and properties of both elements and relations.
— wikipedia/Clements et al

System: What?
“A system is an
interconnected set of
elements that is
coherently organized in a
way that achieves
something”
-- Donella Meadows

Architecture: What?
Software architecture refers to the high level
structures of a software system, the discipline of
creating such structures, and the documentation of
these structures. It is the set of structures needed to
reason about the software system. Each structure
comprises software elements, relations among them,
and properties of both elements and relations.
-- wikipedia/Clements et al

"All architecture is design but
not all design is architecture.
Architecture represents the
significant design decisions
that shape a system, where
significant is measured by cost
of change."
— Grady Booch, blog post,
March 2, 2006
Architecture: Again?

from Olaf Zimmermann’s presentation at SATURN 2010
Architecture: Decisions!

of change."
-- Grady Booch, blog post,
March 2, 2006

"Everyone designs who
devises courses of action
aimed at changing existing
situations into preferred
ones."
-- Herbert Simon
Design?
Image source: Pittsburg Post Gazette Archives

"The engineer, and more
generally the designer, is
concerned with how things
ought to be - how they
ought to be in order to
attain goals, and to
function."
-- Herbert Simon
Design?

We design to get more
what we* want.
* For some value of we (tbd)
Design?

significant design decisions that
shape a system, where
of change."
-- @Grady_Booch, blog post,
March 2, 2006

Architecturally Significant?

Is this the part where we get to talk
about Technical Wisdom?!
[insert obligatory Yoda image]

Image source: zoranphoto.deviantart.com
Is this the part where we get to talk
about Technical Wisdom?!

Source: HandbookOfSoftwareArchitecture.com
"the architecture of a system
is the naming of the most
we measure significant by cost
of change and by impact upon
use."
– @Grady_Booch

Decisions that shape a system
• give form to the system
• set direction; constrain; bring
integrity, consistency and unifying
aesthetic to the system
Cost of change
Impact upon use

Structurally significant
• Organizing structure
• Architecturally significant
mechanisms
• Structural integrity and sustainability
Strategically significant
• game shapers and game changers

Architecture
Architecture enables and
constrains
Minimalist
— Dana Bredemeyer

Appeal to Authority
“The legitimate object of
government is to do for a
community of people
whatever they need to
have done, but can not do
at all, or can not so well
do, for themselves – in
their separate, and
individual capacities.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Image source: wikipedia

Architecture
Decisions that must be made
from a system perspective
• across boundaries

Intentional and Emergent
source: HandbookOfSoftwareArchitecture.com
“Every software-intensive
system has an architecture.
In some cases that
architecture is intentional,
while in others it is
accidental. Most of the time
it is both, born of the
consequences of a myriad of
design decisions made by its
architects and its developers
over the lifetime of a system,
from its inception through its
evolution.” – @Grady_Booch

Image source: ibm.com
Visual Design

An Engineer!

Investigating and developing theory:
structure and dynamics
Leonardo Da Vinci Notebooks

Capturing and exploring designs of
mechanisms

Copying
(a good thing)

Inventions —
By Thinking!
Image source: wikipedia.
Among the inventions
credited with passing
into general practical
use are
• the strut bridge,
• the automated bobbin
winder,
• the rolling mill,
• the machine for testing the
tensile strength of wire and
• the lens-grinding machine

Sketching
• To observe (more attentively)
• To study, think, reason,
to puzzle things out
• To record
• to think longer, harder
• to show, to teach
• To invent, to combine,
to make (new) connections
• To test ideas
• thought experiments
• To persuade

Eye Pencil
“The art of seeing has to be learned”
– Marguerite Duras
“Powers of observation can be
developed by cultivating the habit of
watching things with an active,
enquiring mind.” – WIB Beveridge

Anatomy
“First of all, as a sculptor, engineer,
architect, he had an intuitive
understanding of form — when he
dissected a body, he could understand in a
very fluid way how the different parts of
the body fit together, worked together.
And then, having made that
understanding, as a supreme draftsman,
he was able to record his observations and
discoveries in drawings of such lucidity,
he’s able to get across the form, the
structure to the viewer”
-- Martin Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci:
Anatomist
Image source: Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Visualization in Medicine Today
Brain Scans: peer inside
your head – while you’re
alive
Image source: Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, Oxford University.

Brain Scans: peer inside
your head – while you’re
alive and thinking!
[This fMRI scan shows the areas of
the brain active when you tell a
lie.]
Image source: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/.

Brain Scans: revealing
the brain’s pathways
Image source: Tyszka, et al. The Journal of Neuroscience 2011.

Image source: wikpedia
Visual processing
Design for Visual Processing

Source: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
code is visual
Visual Design
;-)

Code is design!

"An airplane can contain some
six million lines of software
code
equivalent to a three-story-
high pile of books"
— Source: IBM Rational
Code as Design

“The code is the truth”
— Sam Guckenheim
“The code is the truth, but not
the whole truth”
— Grady Booch
3 stories, and it’s not even the
whole truth?!
Code as Design

Hard to wrap our arms around
quite so much truth
- understanding
- communication
- change
- interactions
Code as Truth

Missing key truths
- context
- big picture
- rationale
- alternatives (ruled out)
System properties
- emergent from relationships
- context dependent
Code is

Code is design! But…
“we need good top level design”
www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_13yearslater.html

Why We Model
• To abstract
• To reason
• To show
• To test
• To document
• To transform
To address wicked problems:
To deal with complexity
-- buffer overflow!
To work together
-- shared thought-space
To communicate
-- explain, defend, preserve

Abstractions
“As programmers we deal
with abstractions all the time
and we have to invent them in
order to solve our problems”
Michael Feathers

Cohesion

Parts Flying in Formation

Visual: Good for
Exploring Relationships
• Explore and express
relationships
• Structural
• Causal
• Temporal
• Make connections

At Heart of Architecture:
structure and relationships
Posit structure
Explore behavior
Revise structure

At Heart of Architecture:
structure and relationships
Posit
structure
Explore
behavior
Revise structure
Patterns
Metaphors
Experience
Existing stuff
Sequence,
Activity,
Communication
Diagrams,
State charts,
Ad hoc diagrams
How will this work?

•Cohesive responsibilities (separation of concerns)
•Balanced distribution of responsibilities
Posit responsibilities
Refine as explore behavior
and different views
Patterns
Metaphors
Experience
Existing stuff
Factor and Refactor
“The responsibility of architecture is the
architecture of responsibility.”
-- Jan van Til

Image source: stylonica.com
Technical Wisdom
Can haz?

Technical Wisdom
“A change of perspective is
worth 80 IQ points”
– Alan Kay

(Change) Perspective
http://www.xkcd.com/32/

Programming
as Theory Building

Design Arguments
“The Federalist Papers are
arguments that support
different parts of the design
of the Constitution. And the
Constitution itself is a set of
principles for building a very
complex dynamic structure
that should last for
centuries”
– Alan Kay
Source: Powerful Ideas Need Love Too!

“it seems to have been reserved to the
people of this country, [..], to decide the
important question, whether societies of
men are really capable or not, of
establishing good government from
reflection and choice, or whether they
are forever destined to depend, for their
political constitutions, on accident and
force.” Federalist No.1
Reflection and Choice

Mechanisms?
The Federalist Papers,
No. 51 addresses
• checks and balances
• separation of powers

How does it even?

LMAX Disruptor Mechanism
Source: Martin Fowler
http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Cockburn’s
Hexagonal Architecture

Image: Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye
Coincidence?
ABATIS, n. [1.] Rubbish in front of a
fort, to prevent the rubbish outside
from molesting the rubbish inside.

68
What do you do when you don’t
want a fox in your hen house?

69
Watchdog

Mechanism Designs
• Federalist Papers
• Da Vinci Notebooks
• Design Patterns

Architecture is super hella important
decisions

Technical Wisdom
Can haz?

"The engineer, and more
generally the designer, is
concerned with how things
ought to be - how they ought
to be in order
to attain goals, and
to function."
-- Herbert Simon
How things ought to be

Technical Wisdom
More??

“I confess that there are several
parts of this constitution which I do
not at present approve, but I am
not sure I shall never approve
them: For having lived long, I have
experienced many instances of
being obliged by better
information, or fuller
consideration, to change opinions
even on important subjects, which I
once thought right, but found to be
otherwise. It is therefore that the
older I grow, the more apt I am to
doubt my own judgment, and to
pay more respect to the judgment
of others.”
Benjamin Franklin

Technical Wisdom
Please, oh please?

“If you haven’t thought of
three possibilities, you
haven’t thought enough.”
– @JerryWeinberg
Rule of Three

Extraordinary Moment
“What, at this extraordinary
moment, is the most
important thing for me to
be thinking about?”
— Buckminster Fuller

v
v v v
What
(system view)
How
What
(user view)
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
STRUCTURAL
BEHAVIORAL
CAPABILITIES
CONTEXT
Why How well
FUNCTIONAL QUALITIES
System Design Intent (what should be)

Design: Structure
• Elements and relationships

Structure
“box and line”

Structure
• Relation to host topology
• containers (Simon
Brown)
• deployment view in UML

Behavior
Ad hoc
UML-ish
UML
• sequence
• communication
• activity
• timing

v
v v v
What
(system view)
How
What
(user view)
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
STRUCTURAL
BEHAVIORAL
CAPABILITIES
CONTEXT
Why How well
FUNCTIONAL QUALITIES
System Design Intent (what should be)
mechanisms

Extraordinary Moment
“What, at this extraordinary
moment, is the most
important thing for me to be
thinking about?”
— Buckminster Fuller

System Design Intent
(what should be)
System Design Reflection
(what is)

Roundtrip Back to Roundtrip
Engineering?

Image: Michele Lanza, presentation on slideshare titled “Of Code and Change”

Perhaps we were too literal

(what should be)
(what is)
What’s architecturally significant??

(what should be)
(what is)
But… what’s this??
What’s architecturally significant?

Design Across
Context System-in-Context
(use, dev, ops)
System
(Ecosystem)
Architecture
structure and
mechanisms
“Requirements”
design of system
capabilities
Strategy
ecosystem interventions

Code Wins
“Code wins arguments”
– Mark Zuckerberg
but are all arguments worth
having?

Experiment — on paper!
Sketch prototypes and
pretendotypes

But soon, and then often

Imagine this slide is
M.C. Escher’s Magic Mirror

Cobbler’s Children
• Does the software
cobbler’s children
have any shoes, or are
they still in
“research”?
100

Visualization
Shiny!
• but what’s it
good for?

102

What How Who
SYSTEM
STATIC DYNAMIC
ORGANIZATION
semantic
dependency
hierarchy
Elements and relationships

Nest Circles Layout
Flare on Flare

Dependency Structure Matrix
Lattix

Dependency Map
Structure101

What How Who
SYSTEM
STATIC DYNAMIC
ORGANIZATION
What is where?
Elements and relationships
How does it work?
Dependencies/coupling?
Coherence?
Behavior

How Well
Structural qualities Behavioral qualities Team qualities
(POLY)METRIC
/DASHBOARD
(reflective)
SIMULATIONS
/PROJECTIONS
(predictive)
experiment predict plan

How Well
(POLY)METRIC
(reflective)
SIMULATIONS
/PROJECTIONS
(predictive) experiment predict plan
City Map: spot structural
anomalies like “god” classes

How Well
DASHBOARD
(reflective)
SIMULATIONS
/PROJECTIONS
(predictive)
experiment predict plan
TuningFork: spot “hot spots” in
performance analysis
XRadar: spot anomalies in code
quality across packages

When
POINT-IN
-TIME
OVER TIME
Point-in-time versus Evolution

When
POINT-IN
-TIME
OVER TIME
Point-in-time versus Evolution: System Structure

When
POINT-IN
-TIME
AGE
-SENSITIVE
Point-in-time versus Evolution: System Structure

When
POINT-IN
-TIME
OVER TIME
Code Map
markers: Who is
working on what
right now
ConcernLinesConc
erns
over time
Point-in-time versus Evolution: Organization
DeveloperRivers

Locating Tech Debt

Code Looks Like…
a Pollock?

Architecturally Significant, Yes
“Developing a sense for
code going awry is not a
luxury.”
-- Yves Reynhout

It has a name?

Illustration: @1957 Disney
Code as a Crime Scene

Illustration: @1957 Disney
Code as a Crime Scene
hot spot analysis
— complexity
— change

Smells?
Sensory Journeys (2009-10)
project by the artist Christian Nold

Richard I. Cook

What is visualization in design good
for?

Design Visualization: Smoke and Mirrors (slides)

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