Ask HN: Whiteboard-driven development?

2 pointstechiferous1 comment

Someone recently suggested this process for designing a software architecture: get about a half-dozen developers together in a room for a few days and use the whiteboard to come up with architectural solutions. I'm curious what HNers think about this process or how they've designed software architectures in the past.

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On a previous startup my CTO said lets meet for two weeks before we write a single line of code. I was in a hurry to get started because well money had started to flow out of my bank account!

But I agreed, we created a few walls worth of whiteboards using tile board from Home Depot because I was too cheap to spend the thousands of dollars it cost to buy that many square feet of regular white boards.

In short it was the single best thing we did. The original idea changed greatly as we marched towards product market fit and the model we crafted was flexible enough to accommodate all the changes.

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