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Continuous Design and how to enable it
How Agile and DevOps can influence a modern approach to the design of software visuals, UX, and interactions.
This is an excerpt from a course I am making with Newline, called “The newline Guide to React Component Design Systems with Figmagic”. You might also be interested in my article “How To Automate Design Handoffs and Set Up a Design System with Figmagic”.
From waterfall to DevOps
Let’s look back a few decades. Most software would be made within large organizations that could afford expensive computer hardware and the few knowledge workers (such as programmers) who could create functional software. The circumstances would essentially be high cost, high risk, low number of skilled workers, and organizations that were organized by department or specialization. Like a natural extension of the Taylorism and Fordism of the industrial age, the thinking went that work could be sliced into discrete, known units: more or less a kind of assembly-line production. These units, by virtue of being understood and known, would therefore be possible to plan and manage and act on with a high degree of precision.
This historically lead to the so-called Waterfall method of project management. While there are variants of this, the model prescribes that the initial phases–the design as such–is to be done before executing on its implementation. The heavy up-front planning is assumed to be more efficient than taking risks dynamically while implementing the work package.
This was only further exacerbated by the later notions of “just-in-time-delivery” and economies of scale. Because markets were less volatile, the economy less global and services were physical or mechanical, planning cycles could practically afford to be longer; the world was more predictable. The events of the ongoing Covid pandemic have shown that this planning fallacy lacks resilience and is unfit for highly variable environments.
Let’s roll forward to the present day. For the last 20 years, with the extreme frequency of change…
