26.1 Design Goals

Before we decide how to make a well-designed program, we need to define what we mean bywell designed. Different people value different things. But in most cases, people tend to value the same attributes. So let's explore what people value in a program:

Reliability

People want a program that works. Crashes are extremely frustrating. They cost people time, cause data loss, and in extreme cases can cost people's lives. So reliability is extremely important.

Economy

Most people, especially managers, don't like to spend money. They want the cheapest software possible.

Ease of use

No program is useful if people can't use it. This may sound a bit obvious, but lots of programmers suffer from the "added feature disease" where they want to cram as many features as possible into their code. The result is something overly complex and difficult to use: in other words, a badly designed program.