This chapter in Beautiful Architecture dealt with the structure of the KDE project with two case studies. Akonadi is the backbone of personal information management(PIM), used by email and similar applications. Threadweaver is the library used for highly concurrent operations.
Overall, I found the presentation quite biased toward open source development. Granted, this was trying to show the advantages of their architecture, and especially team development, but using straw man logical fallacies is not the way to do it.
Putting that aside, it was interesting to see the thought process used in arriving at decisions. It was hard for the team to arrive at a decision, because a consensus had to be arrived at when deciding how to implement the KDE PIM project. In a more formal team structure, a leader would make the decision and the team would have to live with the choice. In the KDE environment, greater buy-in is generated by having a consensus before beginning development, but at the expense of time in convincing others. Perhaps it would have been worthwhile to prototype different solutions and then obtain concrete metrics for going forward. On my last product we had a couple of options for ways to implement a design, so we prototyped the solutions to evaluate what would work best. Any thoughts?
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