Today is a momentous day for the DotNotStandard team. I am proud and pleased to announce the public release of the fruits of our labours over the past year: DesiGen. DesiGen is a design and generation tool, intended to help agile software development teams build better, more secure software quickly.
DesiGen combines two of the practices I have championed for years: design and code generation. Each offers huge benefits - detailed elsewhere - but I think the combination of the two is what makes DesiGen such a compelling proposition. Being able to create a design and then have the tool generate a fair proportion of the code from that design is a very efficient process. By also including some simple auditing and risk management as part of the process flow, we can help encourage developers to think about other areas of development that might otherwise get overlooked in the race to get coding done.
DesiGen is a free tool, available for use by anyone that cares to try it. My hope is that by making the tool free, we can help guide the industry towards a better future, where security and maintainability are considered before code is written. While no approach can eliminate human error entirely, my hope is that this technique can guide people away from the dangerous rush to go live at all costs, reducing the real world impacts this can have on our customers, and the companies who have entrusted their work to us.
To aid the launch, I have created a video series describing the purpose and benefits of design, including demos of how to do design - something we as an industry have not been good at in the past. The videos, and the companion website, are all public and available for your viewing pleasure from today. Go to https://getdesigning.dotnotstandard.com for all of the links, and extra background behind the benefits and methods available to carry out design.
For those that are short on time and need a quick demo, the TL;DR video is episode 5 available at https://youtu.be/C_SRyYLHnVo. The full series is available as a playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjvHiORS85l6zeDj-0WhBCCuTXYy6WKb1 and there is more to come.
My thanks go to all of the people that have helped along the way. Rather than leak their personal information on the web, I simply say to everyone who has been involved - in whatever way - thank you. I hope you know who you are, and how helpful it has been.