9 Making sustainable design decisions

What is the most difficult decision you’ve had to make in your life? The answer to that question will be different for everyone. How did you approach this decision? That question might yield more similar answers. “I weighed my options,” “I asked for advice,” “I went with my gut feeling,” and so on. Making a decision clearly involves comparing things with each other, but what else does it entail?

We’ve spoken about ranking, cognitive bias, and conflict. All of these things happen when you’re trying to design your software solution in a collaborative setting. What is software design if not making decisions? We haven’t really spoken about what decisions are, so we’re going to do that in this chapter. We’ll dive a bit deeper into what a decision is, giving you a framework to reason about decisions in general. We’ll discuss software design–related decisions and how to improve the sustainability of those decisions by using Deep Democracy as a facilitator.

9.1 Decisions, decisions, decisions

9.1.1 What is a decision anyway?

9.1.2 Decision vs. outcome

9.1.3 What you need to make a decision

9.1.4 Reactive vs. proactive decisions

9.1.5 Sustainability in software design

9.2 Decision-making styles and levels of buy-in

9.2.1 Autocracy vs. democracy

9.2.2 Creating buy-in on decisions

9.2.3 Buy-in on software design decisions

9.3 Facilitating sustainable design decisions

9.3.1 Moving toward a majority vote

9.3.2 Go fishing!

9.4 Collaborative software design catalysts