Comments on: I study software, not software engineering

By: martin

martin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 08:23:15 +0000

It is a shame that common sense like “certain things are useful in certain contexts” don’t get twittered, redditted, blogged, digged, slashdotted

By: Prabhakar Karve

Prabhakar Karve — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:10:48 +0000

I came to this blog by chance, but found lot of sense in what you are saying. While building and maintaining software, we need to take care of two diagramatically opposite systems, namely the production system and the innovation system.

The production system needs to be predictable, repeatable, measurable, deterministic, hierarchial and low risk. On the other hand, the innovation systems are uncertain, exploratory, judgemental, ambiguous, cross-functional and high risk.

By whatever name we call it, software engineering MUST help us balance these two systems in the most approrpiate way for a given situation.

By: Wyatt

Wyatt — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:20:43 +0000

@Manuel Web design is not the same as developing for the Web. I'm not sure what the point of conflating the two is.

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:38:20 +0000

A follow-up: Tom DeMarco seems to agree that the notion of 'engineering' is outdated, in a recent article on IEEE Software. He thinks we should be focusing more on delivering value, where we've seen some amazing success, rather than precision and meeting deliverables.

By: Manuel

Manuel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:59:28 +0000

I do not think a web designer is a software engineer, since he is using an application, the same way that a painter is not a chemical engineer since he is using a chemical product. I do agree in the term software engineer because you are building up an application, no matter how complex (or simple) this may be. A civil engineer may be designing the next CN Tower or just paving a driveway, that do not means that he can just become an “craftman” for the later task and do not apply his knowledge and discipline in the required amounts. Not all developers are scientifics, and change and inconsistency exists in many engineers fields, not only software!

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:04:33 +0000

@Jordi: I think that’s what I mean .. but this is engineering in the purest sense of design and experiment, find a ‘good enough’ solution to the problem. I wasn’t around in the 60s and 70s, but I imagine, like IBM not imagining that there would be ‘a computer on every desktop’, software experts back then would have found it hard to predict the sheer size and variety of today’s software landscape.

@Jorge: One of the things that I think about is relevance; it doesn’t seem to bother physicists, so why do we care? I wish I could close my eyes to the problem like some in the field do. I think the issue, like the CHASE workshop mentions, is that ultimately this is a human endeavour, and so research needs to reflect that.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:49:04 +0000

It is a shame that common sense like “certain things are useful in certain contexts” don’t get twittered, redditted, blogged, digged, slashdotted. Only this extremism of opinions gets any play online, see Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Uncle Bob, etc.

Common sense isn’t interesting or bloggable. No one wants to hear that XP is a really bad idea if you have very strict requirements, no one wants to hear that gee if you have requirements document already made maybe SCRUM isn’t so useful. No one wants to hear “maybe SCRUM and XP are working for you because you didn’t do anything before”.

No one wants to hear this, thus developers will continue to be assailed by consultants pushing the latest greatest things.

BTW you suck at SCRUM and you should hire me to tell you how you do everything wrong.

By: Jordi Cabot

Jordi Cabot — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:40:39 +0000

The fact that “we don’t do engineering the way they had hoped” does not imply that we shouldn’t do it. What we should be able to is to find out the right amount of “engineering” for each project (depending on the size of the project, the criticality of the domain,…)

By: Jorge

Jorge — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:07:49 +0000

Good post; thanks Neil.

“I would really like to move academic research up this list.” –many of us do, but not that many want to drop what they’re doing and study research questions that practitioners actually find relevant.