When working to create a product or application, often, the team building said product learns on the job. The team gains an understanding of the specific domain of the application in order to add degrees of freedom to the code in order to allow for any of a number of goals (e.g. a minimum of dependencies across modules for easy team based development).
In order to aid this process of design, I'd like to propose an application that serves as a guide for programmers (or teams of programmers), helping them towards better design. While this tool does include some technical capabilities (e.g. design test cases via code analysis), its main function is sociological. Iterating on a design and prototyping will provide software designers an opportunity to really understand the domain in which they are working with a specific piece of software.
- phases of the process
- initial high level strategy phase
- iterate
- strategy/design
- detail what you seek to learn/try out this time around
- write 'design test cases' as to what you seek to explore in english or with a code analysis library which is provided
- prototype
- goal is to test ideas posed in design phase
- debrief
- evaluate initial goals/test cases
- explain what was learned
- discuss direction for next iteration
- strategy/design
- final debrief
- implementation
- each phase has a document associated with it, which can be collaboratively created in a rich context.