Adopting design practices for programming

Abstract

Developers continuously design their programs. For example, developers strive for simplicity and consistency in their constructions like practitioners in most design fields. A simple program design supports working on current and future development tasks. While many problems addressed by developers have characteristics similar to design problems, developers typically do not use principles and practices dedicated to such problems. In this chapter we report on the adoption of design practices for programming. First, we propose a new concept for integrated programming environments that encourages developers to work with concrete representations of abstract thoughts within a flexible canvas. Second, we present continuous versioning as our approach to support the need for withdrawing changes during program design activities.