In the software development industry, we spend a lot of time talking about good design and not nearly enough about design as it is practiced normally. Every code base bears the mark of thousands of micro and macro code design decisions. In the end these decisions give code bases form and the form that they culminate in is rarely what we call "good" or effective design. In this session, Michael Feathers will review empirical research concerning long-lived code bases, describe the common forms that code often falls into over a period of time, and lead a discussion about how we might alter our notions of goodness in design in response to the bare facts about how our actions give code shape.
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