Overcoming the Hidden Shortcomings of Design Patterns (11/7)
I was researching interesting uses of design patterns and all I could find were sources discussing how amazing design patterns are. They can effectively simplify common problems and in doing so, can help developers to conceptualize a problem and more efficiently overcome it by adopting a design process that the developer community has already begun (such as patterns in the famous Game of Four book). Eventually, I came across a blog post from Cathy Dutton that broke down some of the problems associated with design patterns. In this post I will discuss some of the points she makes and how they should be considered by developers throughout a project.
She continuously draws insights into the shortcomings of design patterns as they pertain to the desires of the users. While design patterns effectively reduce development hesitancy and push projects to production quickly, they often result in developers overlooking client needs including how they can interact with the final product and what use cases they prioritize. There are many qualities of a project that are user specific and this is a concept that a developer needs to keep in mind, especially knowing that design patterns are generalized and focused on an ‘average’, made-up client. Moreover, there are circumstances in which the technological tool set described by a possible design pattern is not the best solution for their problem. The example she provided on this concept was: if people are angry about the duration of a phone application, rather than streamlining the application with a pattern, they would be better off learning and accommodating the fact that the frustration was caused by lack of information to the applicant up front.
The concerns expressed on design patterns by Cathy Dutton make a lot of sense and I believe are largely solved when a development team follows agile methodologies throughout the course of a project. Since the iterative style of agile development keeps the clients consistently at the forefront of project direction and decisions, their input is the valuable aspect that assures a project ultimately solves the problem in the way they want it to. The developers can start with the design patterns they think fit the best in a certain project scenario, but ultimately, they should update and modify their efforts to keep them aligned with user preferences for each iteration of implementing the design of the project.