parti
June 14, 2010
I am reading Matthew Frederick’s “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School” because I’m a bit of a sucker for architecture as an analog for the systems development process. And not just because of Christopher Alexander and “A Pattern Language” though that didn’t hurt. Mr. Frederick introduced me to the term parti as the organizing idea of a building. (The book isn’t paginated, but it’s item 15.) I had never heard of the term before but it resonates. In systems development we talk about an architecture but it in practice it means deciding on–or defaulting on–client-server or multi-tier structures to distribute the software.
I was reminded more of a project I worked on for an intra-company forms messengering system. I used a certain email system as the platform. The project failed miserably. It wasn’t the fault of the email system, at least one of the problems was I hadn’t sat down and throught about the governing nature of the system. It wasn’t email.
In systems analysis it helps to consider the proposed system from as many different angles as possible. Different users and other interested parties. As a static domain classes and then as dynamic processes, and so on. And so, too perhaps, it’s parti.
