Re: PPIG discuss: Software as she is wrote

[Frank Wales]

On 09/30/2007 01:55 AM, Howie Goodell wrote:
> Why am I impressed by such an obvious process?  Because I've seen too
> many failures in the bad old corporate software development process
> that missed most or all of the above!  The process was driven by
> widespread perception of customer needs.  Nobody asked, "what will
> this do to the sales of our existing products?"  Everyone who cared to
> could make suggestions and act on them.  Believe me, these are huge
> advances!

Actually, shhh!  Don't tell anyone, but many pieces of software
that I've worked on came about this way:

  + somehow become aware of problem in need of a solution

  + experiment with readily available tools to explore
    the problem space and candidate solutions

  + wave results in front of users and see if they bite

  + repeat until either everyone gets bored, or
    a better solution appears from somewhere else,
    or other higher-priority tasks claim your time

  + eventually, when it becomes apparent that you need to
    get professional, make the software of adequate
    quality to ship, or otherwise hand over

  + in the process of getting professional, do the
    things that make QA, support and marketing people happy

A non-trivial amount of the software I use daily (Linux,
emacs, OpenOffice, ...) has probably come about using all kinds of
random variations of this approach, in addition to more tidy methods
everyone gets taught in school.

I just though that the process in the case I referred to would
be particularly good at giving some people conniptions:

  + no-one really clearly specified anything, leaving
    the programmers to figure out what might be useful,
    thus annoying anyone who thinks programmers shouldn't
    be allowed to design things by themselves

  + test cases got written near the end of the process, which
    could wind up Agile/XP people

  + specification got written last, and only to satisfy external
    QA paperwork requirements, which might make numerous
    software engineering advocates turn seven shades of purple

  + and, of course, this whole process would probably make
    ISO-9000 advocates weep openly

Well, something has to.
-- 
Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
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