Interface Oriented Design

This book has been sitting on my desk for a long time and I’ve been dipping in and out of it for at least a year. I’m a big fan of The Pragmatic Programmers and the topic of interface is very close to my heart as it is often the most ignored when system analysis and design occurs. Apart from performance, interfaces are generally the biggest problem that is faced when a system goes live because once people start to use it, they want to use it with the other systems and tools they are using. The human interface to a computer system gets, quite rightly, a lot of focus. The topic gets it’s own module in Computer Science degree courses. This has meant that today’s software developer is familiar with the concepts of usability, task analysis, workspace arrangement, error detection and recognition.

I was hoping that Ken Pugh’s Interface Oriented Design was going to be that seminal book which would set out design principles and approaches for deriving robust interfaces. It is not. While it does introduce some interesting concepts such as the Three Laws of Interfaces and Interface Responsibility Interaction it lacks a real world sense about it. In fact, the purpose of the book appears to be the platform to launch Pugh’s Interface Responsibility Interaction format. It’s an interesting idea, but unfortunately it does not make a strong case for using such a format in real projects. Some case studies from other projects where IRI was used would have been beneficial.

One gets the sense that this is a serialisation of some lectures within a system design module in college, with a trivial exercise to prove the points. Put simply, there’s really not much in the book to grab the experienced developers attention.