Luke Hohmann talks with Bill Venners about architecture and culture, the importance of completeness in new architectures, and implementing features in spikes.

Read this Artima.com interview with Luke Hohmann:

http://www.artima.com/intv/architecture.html

What do you think of Luke's comments?

“The second approach gives you an idiot savant, and that's what you don't want.”

I’m going to treasure that phrase “idiot savant” to describe technically correct, but brain dead, software.

Using the concept of spiking (or drilling down) is also a great idea. But if you truly make every build complete and correct (in Luke Hohmann’s sense), then you shouldn’t have big, flat layers that includes lots of untested (and at that point untestable) features. Someone needs to discipline themselves to not let code just grow like a weed before attempting to integrate it.