Assumptions

Last Update: 15.11.2018. By Jens in Newsletter

Assumptions are everywhere.

Yes, anybody has them, at any time, any topic.

Application architectures are no exception. Just a bunch of assumptions. Some good, some slightly off and many totally wrong.

If you base your design on wrong assumptions, it will probably bring problems in the future. Things like “nah, the network is always online, so we don’t need to handle that in the app”, will kick you in the butt soon. One day there will be an outage and you are the only dev in the house. Have fun :-)

Best approach I found so far, is asking questions to get answers. Only answers reduce the sheer amount of assumptions. The hard part though is asking the right question to the right people. And “right” depends highly on the context. Try to verify or dispell your assumptions as much as you can. You will reduce the effect of bad assumptions.

The startup world preaches that in the form of validation. Whatever your idea and assumptions are, go out and validate them. Step by step. Wrong assumptions can kill the startup.

So, whatever you are working on today, pick one of your assumptions and try to validate it. What questions triggers your assumption? How could give you answers?

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