sketch.systems: Prototyping Applications as State Machines

by pcr910303 • 7 years ago

4 1 7 years ago

dpezely• 7 years ago

Hopefully more people identifying themselves as software engineers will use Finite State Machines to better ensure correctness of the system.

Within a San Francisco company recently, suggesting that they create FSM diagrams was met with resistance that such things seemed frivolous.

Asking for Sequence Diagrams, they presented an architecture map.

This confusion occurred with most of the people I asked: e.g., team lead and manager, each with more than a decade of professional experience. This company is well over a decade old with significant recurring revenue, so obviously they must be doing everything right-- Right? Suggesting how to have assurances for correctness was eventually taken into consideration, so I commend them for that much.

Unfortunately, they are not unique in that way. While I only have a small sample size of a handful of Silicon Valley companies that I've experienced firsthand as employee or visitor, that was the pattern at all but one. (The one exception was BugSense, by the way: freshly imported from Greece.)

At least with a tool like sketch.systems, defining an explicit FSM as part of a prototyping tool may satisfy places that insist that "docs go out of date".

Suggestions for features:

1. in addition to the JavaScript for behaviour mock-up, consider also supporting WASM.

2. If the behaviour mock-up code could be called from an API, integration tests could also confirm a mismatch between design versus actual.

sketch.systems: Prototyping Applications as State Machines

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