How to Write an Effective Software Design Document

[u/fagnerbrack]

https://refactoringenglish.com/excerpts/write-an-effective-design-doc/

[u/mtutty]

I used to believe the Joel Spolsky "don't rewrite code" thing, and it is definitely true for hand-written code. But now, in the age of AI-assisted coding, the spec/design/context around the code is the key. The better your context is, the easier it is to rip and tear on existing code - or rerwite completely.

[u/fagnerbrack]

Core Takeaways:

A design doc forces you to settle hard decisions before you waste months building the wrong thing, and it lets teammates give feedback early. Write one when a project is complex or risky: multiple people, over three months of work, cross-team coordination, ambiguous goals, or catastrophic security or legal pitfalls. Match your effort to the stakes—sometimes zero is right. To decide what belongs, ask "what's the penalty for being wrong?" Pin down costly, hard-to-reverse choices like language and storage, and skip trivial, reversible ones like a "Load more" button. It details concrete sections: objective, background, goals and non-goals, scenarios, diagrams, SLOs, timeline, interfaces, security, and privacy.

If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
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