RDD, Design Heuristics and More

In this episode I spoke with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock,  a software engineer, architect and consultant. While attending the University of Oregon as a Computer Science student, Rebecca also double majored in Cognitive Psychology. For the past twenty plus years, she has been implementing her education and learnings in psychology in her consultancy and workshops for software designers and IT businesses. Her work focused on Object-Oriented Designs and Object-Oriented Programming, before coming up with Responsibility-Driven Design. Her ideas on this approach of development were the inspiration for many others that came up with other xDD methods, namely Eric Evans in his development of Domain-Driven Design. 

Rebecca has also done extensive research in Design Heuristics. The idea of heuristics was initially explored by Dr. Billy Vaughn Koen, a nuclear physicist and a professor emeritus at UT Austin. She then went further and examined these heuristics and their connections with patterns in the realm of software design and architecture. We explored these ideas in some detail during our talk. 

We then discussed a couple of her many workshops; in particular the importance of storytelling in designing software systems, and software architects and the process of making decisions when designing an application or system. 

Rebecca is the author of Designing Object-Oriented Software and Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations. 

To learn more about Rebecca’s workshops, blogs, and more visit her website. You can read her article on heuristics and patterns here. Rebecca has given many fantastic talks on the topic of Design Heuristics in various conferences. You can find a few of them below: