[prog] State of software engineering profession
Jimen Ching
jching at flex.com
Tue Apr 15 00:28:12 EST 2003
On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Mary wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 14, 2003, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
>> When we did things according to theory, what wound up happening was we
>> got design documents with subtle contradictions, corner cases which
>> were left unhandled... i.e., we found bugs in the design. Sometimes
>> the bugs could be fixed while still keeping the design intact; and
>> other times we had to totally break the design. Sometimes, small and
>> subtle changes had catastrophic effects. So the only sensible way to
>> design the software was to _write_ the software, and let the source
>> code be the design.
>
>People who use formal methods to design or describe programs
>(mathematical proofs that the input and the program produce the desired
>output) have been known to spend as much time debugging their models and
>proof as others do their program.
I can't decide whether this a good or bad thing. Or is this just an
observation?
--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR) jching at flex.com wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org
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