[prog] State of software engineering profession

Jenn Vesperman jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au
Tue Apr 15 05:11:50 EST 2003


On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 04:45, 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.
> 
> Writing the code first, and then writing a design from the code, is a
> horribly broken way to do business.  But it's a lot smarter than to
> write a design document first, get bureaucratically married to it, and
> be unable to overcome its inertia when you have to deviate from the
> document later to overcome unforeseen bugs.

The problem there, as I see it, would be being bureaucratically married
to the design. Wheee.



Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.
   My book 'Essential CVS': published by O'Reilly in June 2003.
jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/




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