Software Design Dilemma

Thank you, Sushil.

As the the design pattern, I'm afraid I wasn't clear enough about them. Not only the knowledge of design and architectural patterns is useful, in practice, it is a must. I didn't mean knowledge. I mentioned patterns only once in my answer, in connection of wrong understanding of them as the part of a cookbook. (By the way, please see the very useful note on design patterns by Ron Beyer, in the comments to the question. And also, please see the "Criticism" section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern#Criticism.)

I saw too much of engineering myth saying that main thing is the ability to search and read: you open a book, ask yourself: "what do we need?", find it and apply. While having such skills is important (and not having them means total inability to do the job), this skill is nothing compared to the ability to think. More exactly, this is one of the first rudimentary steps...

Here is one tell-a-tail story a friend of mine told me. Do you know a median filter? It has some width N. You have N sorted numbers from input (in 1D case), and you add find the one in the middle position by sorting order, remove it from the set of N, send it to output, take input numbers one by one, each time put one element in the sorted order, then pick another for output, and so on. One guy tasked with the filter, asked himself: "what do we need? sorting", took the reference, saw the sorting algorithms... this one, this, and this is named "quick sort". "Do we need slow sorting? No. Thank quick sort will be just right". Implemented. Working. Applied sorting algorithm to the set of N on each step, aha. My friend exclaimed: "full, he did not even think that this is not really sorting as defined by this algorithm problem, this is adding an element in already sorted sequence, a very different and simple thing".

And I was amazed to see such thing as the "plumbing only architecture". Sometimes, people say: I need to create some "plumbing", that is, infrastructure part of the software: functional units, layers, collaboration between them. The skeleton without meat. If you try to put only meat, the project is hard to complete and nearly impossible to support. But did you see a skeleton almost without meat? Functionality is almost achieved, but meat-to-bone ratio is amazingly low. You see millions of the methods, and many of them take value from somewhere and send it somewhere else, or something like that. And many well-known patterns are used. :-)

Honestly, knowing the patterns is important, but lack of such knowledge is easy to fix, so this is not such a great problem. What is more important, is the knowledge and understanding of anti-patterns. Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern...

—SA

My pleasure. Thank you again.
—SA