Defining Design Quality

Nice article on Defining Design Quality at InfoQ.com. The article heavily references the work of James Shore, who is currently working on a book with chromatic entitled "The Art of Agility". It has a pretty nice definition of design quality:

"A good software design minimizes the time required to create, modify, and maintain the software while achieving run-time performance."

It also references a few other nice articles:

• An Artima interview with Erich Gamma which notes that "Modification and maintenance time are more important than creation time."
  
• An article by Alistair Cockburn on programming as theory building
  

This also ties in quite nicely with Agile ideas about "Simple Design" and some earlier blog-postings of mine about Simplicity in Design (and ChangeThis for Simplicity).