Episode 192 | Rebecca Wirfs-Brock - Understanding Perception

Guest: Rebecca Wirfs-Brock @https://twitter.com/rebeccawb Rebecca Wirfs-Brock talks with Dave Rael about design, influence, patterns, personal skills, and having an influence on progress Rebecca is an object design pioneer who invented the set of design practices known as Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD). By accident she started the x-Driven Design meme (TDD, DDD, BDD…) and along the way authored two popular object design books that are still in print. In her work, Rebecca helps teams hone their design, architecture and thinking skills, manage and reduce technical debt, and adequately address architecture risks. In addition to coaching and personal mentoring, she conducts workshops on Responsibility-Driven Design, enterprise application design, agile design skills and thinking, being agile about system qualities, and Agile Architecture. Rebecca is program director of the Agile Alliance’s Experience Report Initiative and on The Hillside Group board. Recently she has written patterns about sustainable architecture, agile software quality, and adaptive systems architectures. She blogs at The Responsible Designer (http://wirfs-brock.com/blog/). If you are interested in writing about your experiences or sharing your wisdom in pattern form, contact Rebecca. She can help you turn your urge to write into the written word. Chapters: 2:15 - Dave introduces the show and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock4:39 - Rebecca's running practice6:19 - How running is like writing software8:45 - Opportunity costs9:48 - How and why Rebecca became an author12:11 - Rebecca's introduction to object-oriented programming14:35 - Rebecca's marriage and Allen Wirfs-Brock16:14 - School, women in software, computer science as a discipline, and changes over time19:23 - How Rebecca got started in software and interested in design23:12 - Rebecca shares thoughts on the nature of design24:41 - Rebecca's story of failure - unrealistic expectations28:34 - Advice for making expectations more realistic32:21 - Cognitive psychology and understanding perception; the importance, virtue, and skills of selling ideas34:41 - Presentation of options in trying to sell ideas37:50 - Rebecca shares thoughts on the nature and value of patterns42:46 - The importance of design consistency44:21 - Rebecca's success story - Responsibility-Driven Design, contributing to a shared vocabulary, and influence48:11 - Rebecca's book recommendations53:57 - How Rebecca stays current with what she needs to know54:21 - Rebecca's top 3 tips for delivering more value55:12 - Keeping up with Rebecca Resources: Rebecca's Blog Responsibility-Driven Design Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations - Rebecca Wirfs-Brock Designing Object-Oriented Software - Rebecca Wirfs-Brock Eric Elliott on Developer On Fire Allen Wirfs-Brock Carl Franklin on Developer On Fire "Fear is the path to the dark side" Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - Erich Gamma Goldilocks and the Three Bears Premature Optimization Uncle Bob Martin on Developer On Fire Uncle Bob Martin on The Single Responsibility Principle Martin Fowler on Anemic Domain Model Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software - Eric Evans Domain-Driven Design Distilled - Vaughn Vernon Rebecca's book recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman Implementing Domain-Driven Design - Vaughn Vernon Rebecca's top 3 tips for delivering more value: Make sure you understand what someone wants, not what you think they want Don't assume others have the same values as you