[forwarded submission from a non-member address -- rjk]
From: "J. Scott Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 09:55:42 -0500 Subject: RE: [Boston.pm] maintenance of large perl code bases To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> One very real issue for maintenance and software engineering standards is the huge productivity disparity between great engineers and normal engineers. Its pretty well known that great engineers have productivity levels of as much as 10x to 15x of mere mortals. When you have people that are this productive, they very often don't choose to follow coding practices and formalized software engineering. And managers just can't force them to since they are so much more productive. Its also extremely hard to manage people w/ 30 - 60 iq points over the managers. If civil engineers and mechanical engineers were that much more productive than their peers, I think we'd see some of the real process failures in those disciplines that we see in software engineering. Scott -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of David Cantrell Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 8:51 AM To: Joe Johnston Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] maintenance of large perl code bases On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 07:46:46AM -0500, Joe Johnston wrote: > I've been very interested in software engineering practices for a while > now. > > ... > > Sure, programming is an art, but so is brige-building and highway > construction. Yet, the process that creates these real-world > constructs is very carefully controlled and monitored. Software > Engineer is lagging behind its physical counterparts. No, we're not lagging behind. Software engineering is VERY young - at most, 60 years old. Civil and naval engineering are more like four thousand years old and mechanical engineering at least two thousand years old. It is no surprise that they have managed to iron out a great deal more bugs in their processes than we have. And no, I don't think all our bugs are ones which have been solved in other engineering disciplines.
