Top down or bottom up
The discussion whether to design software bottom up och top down died with intellisense/typeahead/whateveryoucallit; it was so much easier building bottom up. Then refactoring tools entered and suddenly made it easy to program top down again.
Personally I believe the two methods should be mixed. Not like “these methods or modules we design top down and these bottom up” but more like “these methods we design no matter the way”.
Like this:
Here is a method I’d like to have. Here is the call. There is the method signature automagically created. Then some implementing code. And further calls to yet non-existing methods. Which are automagically created. Until we get all the way to the bottom. Where we adjust a couple of parameters. And refactor this up again. And adjust. And refactor. Until we are back where we started with code that is readable both if you track it from the top or the bottom.
Or the other way around if you prefer.
As long as the code gets readable. And updatable.
Tags: architecture