The 4+1 View Model

Software development is a pretty complicated endeavor, with a lot of moving parts and people working on them, and it becomes even more complicated because we as software engineers tend to behave a bit like the five blind men on this week’s videos and writings. We tend to only focus on the things that matter to us without any regard for the project as a whole. The people that are working with persistence want the data to have certain structure that makes it a better fit for the persistence architecture, and they do not care if that makes it easier or harder to use on the rest of the project. If they had their way the data would fit perfectly on the storage solution even if it had to be a frankeinsteinian blob of information. That’s why there’s a huge need for project-wise architecture and software architects, because is their job to be the wise man on Grady Booch’s story and calm the developers down, mixing their needs and priorities in a way that makes sense at a higher level. Although the five men in the story are more related to the 4+1 view model as far as I can tell, that model represents very well some of the most important or predominant points of view that people have or at least should have of a project. The job of an architect should be to make sure that those five (or more) different views on the project make sense with each other and don’t clash much because that will make the rest of the work on that project go that much better. Without having as many conflicting decisions going on at the development stage which gives you less time and perspective to make sound decisions, and more often than not makes the developers the ones responsible with them in a way that they shouldn’t be.