Enable Artists - abstractfactory/pipi GitHub Wiki

Rapidly changing requirements make it impossible to guarantee a fully working state of any critical piece of software within a content creation production environment.

Solution

No tool may perform tasks a human could not do by hand.

Details

This involves any interfaced access to databases or inner workings of a DAG graph. This also goes well with the mantra of Abstract Factory: Enable Artists. Meaning tools enable, they accelerate, but are never the one and only means of performing any given task.

It also involves careful attention to UI and UX design. Thankfully, our target market runs high-end workstations. We'll use that to our advantage.

Side note

The requirement to enable rather than enforce came to me from working with Framestore London.

Their tools were great and there was only one thing standing in our way on a daily basis, which was when the tools weren't so great.

When the tools broke or misbehaved.

I find it unreasonable to expect tools developed for such a fast-changing environment to ever be stable and as such suggest this constraint as a solution.