Design documents serve as technical reports outlining a system's implementation strategy, emphasizing trade-offs and constraints. Similar to mathematical proofs, these documents aim to convince the audience of the design's optimality. Writing design documents is crucial for enhancing clarity and rigor in thought processes, exposing weaknesses in initial intuitions. Effective organization within these documents is as vital as code organization; otherwise, writers risk producing unstructured and confusing text. Learning to craft design documents can significantly improve engineering practices among programmers, particularly those lacking experience in this area.
The act of writing a design document helps to add rigor to what are otherwise vague intuitions. Writing reveals how sloppy your thinking was.
Good design document organization is as important as code organization. Most programmers write 'spaghetti design docs' unless they've had a lot of practice.
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