Fw: [Courses] [C Programming] Anyone still here?

[Jenn Vesperman]

On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 13:21, Sue Stones wrote:

>  As you can see from the replies that you have received there are lots of
>  different
>  philosophies.  The one that I was taught and whole-heartedly agree with is
>  called top
>  down approach.  It is called this because you start at the general
>  description of
>  what you want to model/program and then work down to the detail of the
>  actual
>  code.

If I have a team of people, I like to design top-down until I find
places where I think 'ok, I don't know how to do that//I don't know how
long it will take to write that'. 

Then I give the bit I don't know how to do to one of my people, and tell
them to write a 'proof of concept' for that thing. Which basically is a
throwaway piece of code that's designed to figure out *A* way to do the
job. It doesn't have to be a good way, just a workable way.

If I keep doing that, then hopefully by the time the design is finished,
we'll know we are capable of doing it, and will be able to estimate how
long it will take.



Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.

jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/