[prog] State of software engineering profession

[Jimen Ching]

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