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Mark Brown wrote:
> Is the whole software industry falling apart? Is the approach of the Year
> 2000 like one huge Full Moon, where the wacko's of programming shed their
> nerd appearance and take the persona of mad scientist? Why in an industry
> where we are willing to pay what ever the hell someone charges for software
> do we get CRAP?
<snip, snip>
There's always the old adage among software developers about
their management: There is never time to do it right, but
there is always time (and 10x-100x money) to do it over.
There is another more lengthy answer. This one is written
specifically about Microsoft, but it is not particularly
unusual in my experience with commercial software development
companies. Here is an excerpt from a Usenet newsgroup, passed
along to me by a friend some weeks ago. It is food for thought
and maybe answers part of your question.
You may have wondered why Microsoft products are so bad, and
why they don't seem to have a coherent design. I may have
found an answer to this riddle in a column by Larry Constantine
(remember him? Structured Design?) The following is a quote
from his column in Software Development Magazine.
[begin quote]
In their book, Cusumano and Selby quote Bill Gates himself
as saying, "There's no 'design,' in the sense of how the code
works, that's never done in program management." Another manager
explained that Microsoft uses little or no design documentation:
"A developer's job is to write code that we sell, not to spend
time writing high-level design documents." And Gates confirms
this, rejecting any "methodology where you have a document that's
independent from the source code... Going off and spending a
lot of time on that - that's ridiculous... One document. One.
It's the source code."
[and later on in the column]
In my [Constantine's] opinion, however, Microsoft has been so
successful largely because it has been in the right places at the
right times and ruthlessly and relentlessly pursued advantage,
not because it produces great software and certainly not because
it exemplifies best practices. Microsoft is about selling code
more than it is about writing code, and there is no argument that
it does a good job of selling. Hiring people to write code to
sell is, of course, not necessarily the same as hiring people to
design and build durable, usable, dependable software.
Spending time designing and documenting design is "ridiculous" only
if you don't count the time wasted later trying to work around all
the mistakes in partitioning the problem or fixing the thousands
of bugs that you might have avoided by first planning how things
would fit together. It is time wasted only if you don't account
for the thousands of hours your customers waste due to lost
work or applications that freeze several times a day. If what
you are selling is code, not solutions, only the code counts.
If what you are measuring and interested in is quick answers to
coding questions, then the coders who crank out the most lines of
code by going directly from concept to code are the ones you want.
[end quote]
Just my $0.02 as a former software development manager.
Rod
--
_______________________________________________________________________
J. Rodney Grisham, Ph.D. RevTech Industries, Inc.
mailto:grisham@xxxxxxxxxxx P. O. Box 940129
Phone: 281-493-9221 Houston, Texas 77094-7129
_______________________________________________________________________
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