I beg to differ with Derek's last point. In fact, in most of the engineering world, the low level details of the design are, in fact, left to the most junior people. In the mechanical design world, most of the actual entry of the design into CAD packages is done by people called "designers" who are paid clerical wages and often don't have university degrees. As one might expect, this can produces disconnects in the design process and one of the major marketing thrust in mechanical CAD software world has been to develop packages for use by mechnical engineers, as versus designers. If anything, the software world is distinguished by the fact that the most junior and inexperienced staff have spent longer on university campuses than for other engineering disciplines.
Ruven Brooks -----Original Message----- From: Derek M Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 7:01 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: (no subject) All, >> First, languages can be complex but programs should be simplified >> according to the Chomsky hierarchy of languages. The systems analyst ... >I really do not believe your traditional hierarchy management model of >systems development is either workable or worthy of research. Systems I thought the writer was simply providing a good example of how out of touch academic research is with reality ;-) >Success in a project is more easily obtained when everyone takes >ownership of the problem directly. This is certainly one of the thinking being some of the current trendy methodologies. However, it lacks as much experimental supports as most of what went before it :-( >Software development is a human inspirational activity not a >mechanistic physical activity. I would not go to either of these extremes. The interesting thing about source code is that most of it is very similar and outwardly quiet non-interesting. I think developers do a lot of things mechanically and are not aware of it (and yes, I have as much proof of this claim as everybody else has for theirs). > Anyone studying software development must, must, >must lose the connection between software development and production >engineering. Lets not forget the fact that software development is one of the few professional activities where the most junior and inexperienced staff get to write most of the important parts of the product that the customer actually uses. derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
