Software Design and Programmers1


How important are software design skills to a programmer? Programmers, in the traditional, and perhaps most widespread, view of the software development process, are not themselves seen as designers but rather as people who implement the designs of other people. The real design work is performed by specialized software designers. Designers create the designs and hand them off to programmers, who turn them into code according to the designer’s specifications. In this view, then, the programmer only needs enough design skills to understand the designs given to him. Let’s consider a spectrum of software development "realities." Specialization of function is a key component on these kinds of projects. Analysts specialize in gathering and analyzing requirements, which are handed off to designers who specialize in producing design specifications, which are handed off to programmers who specialize in producing code.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, best represented by the example of Extreme Programming (XP), there are no designers, just programmers, the programmers are responsible for the design of the system. [McBreen, 2003, p. 97] 

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