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to distance themselves from the day-to-day business
concerns of their customers. The modern corporate
focus on stock value and quarterly earnings has
repressed quality concerns to second-class standing.
Requirements documents have become a way of
insulating the corporation from engaging the
customer in dialogue and in the ongoing process of
feedback in development that can lead to true
customer satisfaction. Business and technical
perspectives have displaced the human perspective.
Involving customers as partners, as an
organization that has every bit as much to do with
the structure of your product as your own
organization does, is a good first step in humancentred
design. Such a bird’s-eye view of your
enterprise can offer rich insights into the architecture
of your system, through techniques such as domain
analysis. The architecture precipitates naturally from
the human concerns. Organizational patterns are a
guide to shaping the organizational structures that
bode for success. The software architecture echoes
that same structure by Conway’s Law.
That structure in turn generates the processes
that will guide your designers, systems engineers,
architects, coders, testers, and marketing people in
creating a product that will improve the quality of
life for your customers. Good organizational patterns
concern themselves with the quality of life of your
own employees, too—a corporation should view
them as stakeholders whose needs are as important
as those of customers.
Patterns are small elements of organizational
improvement that contribute to great systems. There
probably is no single vision of what makes a great
organization. Instead, great systems grow from small
systems that work, and they grow through local
adaptation and incremental improvement. Patterns
capture those steps of improvement that we have
found again and again contribute to the health of an
enterprise.
Business success and quality of life both
emanate from grounding in human concerns. There
is no recipe for success, but principles of change
based on human interaction and relationship have
far-reaching benefits for the software development
process and end users. Patterns explicitly embrace
these human concerns and can serve as a foundation
for so-called process improvement and process reengineering.
While patterns can guide an
organization on the path to improvement, both the
initiative to change and the pearls of insight must
come from within the organization. Improvement
proceeds one pattern at a time. In our changing
world, the process never ends.
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