22 February 2011

You tend to favour the solutions you are familliar with...

When I talk to students about the role of the architect I always make a point of the architect must know when not to use a particular solution/pattern/style (the old "Kill your darlings"). Regardless of this I have seen examples when an entire class thinks that a 3-tier architecture is the best solution in a project because they took a course on databases the previous semester.
Likewise, when I talked about component-based architectures in a lecture and gave examples based on AUTOSAR, a lot of students thought that components was the thing, even if it complicated the solution for the developers and the benefits with components was not really relevant in the student  project.

This is not surprising since I am talking about students with limited experience to various problems encountered when developing real systems. But I also think this is a problem for professional developers as well, including myself. We tend to stick to what we know and don't reflect if what we know actually makes things worse than better.

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