so, what about the design phase?

do we need it? i mean, does anyone seriously sit down and spend hours creating all those wacky scenario diagrams, flow charts, and shit? ok. i wonder. coz, on one hand, i think its a load of BS. and on the other hand, i think the genius of any program lies in its design. how many times have you gotten to the tail end of coding your programme, and arrived at some glitch. a glitch you could have caught earlier in the process, had you only just attended to, followed through with and contemplated your programme’s design more thoroughly?

and ask yourself. does a house builder go out and get all the construction equipment as soon as he decides he’s building a house? what about a blue print? some sort of building plan? electrical? plumbing? it would seem an expensive and wasteful activity to approach house building in such a way. yet … so many of us approach program design that way. i wonder why?

and i wonder. why do we think we have to fit our design ideas into some pre-fab diagram? what if my neural pathways don’t produce cognitive output that fits neatly into those uml charts and diagrams? what if … my brain conceives a programming situation differently? its still design right? even if its not some pretty, prefab chart, like they show in the textbooks?