Design is necessary but not sufficient

One final response to another possible skepticism. Some might say that none of this design stuff matters if the software isn’t reliable, scalable, performant, etc.

The answer to this objection is easy: yes. Design is necessary but not sufficient. Just as great architecture won’t make a building successful if the civil engineers fail to ensure that it can withstand the wind, so a well-designed software product can’t succeed without good software engineering.

That doesn’t mean design doesn’t matter, or that design doesn’t have a big impact on these other factors; it just means that design isn’t everything. But to those of us who are designers, it might be still be the most enjoyable and exciting thing…