Gilb on Design

In February 2004, I attended a one day workshop on software design by Tom Gilb¹.

Gilb thinks that competing products tend to have the same feature set and that the competitive edge always comes from what he calls “performance requirements”. His example involves buying a car. You don’t buy it because you can drive from A to B. You buy it because it is faster, cheaper, easier to drive, better looking, easier to maintain than the competition. All of these are system characteristics that you specify as performance requirements.

Once you’ve found out the requirements for your product, you express them in planguage and get your technologists to come up with ideas that fulfill those requirements.

¹ Tom Gilb is well-known for his work on software inspections and is also an early supporter of evolutionary/incremental development models.