It’s a cool morning in Visalia as I enjoy my morning brew. I’m excited to report on the interns’ first week. They all did a great job of fitting in and grabbing a piece of Zygote to work on. I feel very fortunate to have found the talent in time for our push to ship production code by end of summer!

Over the weekend I was thinking about how Modal Software would grow. Modal basically consists of two divisions: Applications and Custom. The Applications division is responsible for marketing and supporting products such as Zygote. The Custom division handles the consulting and custom development projects. Eventually Applications will become the sales and support department while Custom will become the operations department for development. Growing the Custom division will be a careful process.

I have this vision that Custom will be built around small development teams. Each team will be responsible to a customer for a project or a module of a larger project. The team will start with a carefully selected software designer. The designer is responsible for creating a vision of what to deliver. Designers will choose the developers, engineers, graphics designers, and contractors for the team. There is an important distinction between a designer and a manager. Designers write code, test deliverables, pick graphics, choose colors, and make the decisions (sometimes based on the teams’ input) to ship. Designers are not task masters.

I buy into the rule that states as people are added to the design decision making process the integrity of the design is broken down. I believe its best to deliver a cohesive design built on a solid vision with consistent elements and philosophies.

A quote from Donald Norman (author of The Design of Everyday Things):

“You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy…The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.”

At Modal Software our projects may be a tiny fraction of the size of Windows or OS/X but the rule still applies. To deliver the best value to our customers we’ll insure good design by starting with great software designers.

My weekend of thinking about software design ended on the question: How do I find great software designers?

Posted by Richard Caetano on Monday, May 21, 2007