A progression of designs

Late 2022 - Early 2023

Preliminary design

• Early feasibility estimation: is this even worth pursuing?
• What needs to be looked at to build confidence?
• Not about making plans, more about seeding ideas
• Must include a business case or a draft of one

Hypothetical: here’s a direction we could go in, what do you think?

Investigative design

Something we want to do but we don’t know how yet

• Scope and refine the problem, output: a problem statement
• Cast about the solution space, pick a few ideas
• Investigate and evaluate them, present tradeoffs, rank

Conjectural: here’s how we can go about it, let’s pick one to deepen

Design meeting (optional)

We know what we want, we have options, but we want to build confidence and consensus and query direction from a leader or from the group

• Group activity
• Bounce ideas around, refine solutions
• Challenge the problem
• As an offshoot of an investigation: present tradeoffs, talk through solutions

Output: a consensus on the direction to take

In-depth design

We know what we want, where we’re going, we want to know how exactly

• Hammer down the scope of both problem and solution
• Break down into areas and build up a unified, cohesive solution
• Should produce a spec or near-spec document and workplan

Theoretical: should not write code except to figure out details of the plan, but there shouldn’t be any questions left at the end that aren’t a lookup and some dev work away

Implementation

Completes the metaphor: Realisation