Hacker News Reader

I wonder why the "at Google" is necessary for the title. I'd be very surprised to see an organization not use some sort of design doc before building things - the only thing that would be different is the scale and scope of them.

Of course, you won't see a "Design Docs at Amazon" on the front page of HN for...some reason. Gee, I wonder why?

View on HN

> I'd be very surprised to see an organization not use some sort of design doc before building things - the only thing that would be different is the scale and scope of them.

There are companies that use agile methodologies and eschew any kind of design documentation (they kneel at the altar of working code, and working code alone). I’ve seen teams just discuss things, get a few inputs and start writing (working) code and pass it through testing. The design process exists, but there’s no document or documents for anyone to refer to. There may be high level architectural documents, but not what many people understand as “design documents”.

I always wonder how such an approach works towards building maintainable software whose scale is not trivial. Even assuming the code is reviewed unit tested, but still without some kind of design doc guiding the overall structure, and interactions wouldn't it lead to hard to maintain software ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com