Ruven >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
I should have also added a rider about them being relatively unsupervised and admitted to being relatively ignorant of mechanical and civil engineering practices. I guess we might also argue over the level of design decisions these low level workers get to perform and the impact of their decisions on the rest of the product. Does anybody have any references for this kind of thing? >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. One profession practitioners where have lots of education is medicine. I have been reading "Complications: A surgeon's notes on an imperfect science" by Atul Gawande. He describes how he and his fellow surgeons learn their trade (by practicing on live, and in some cases live when they entered the hospital, people). However, there is a lot of supervision and mistakes (ie people not alive when they leave hospital) are analysed at weekly meetings which all doctors are required to attend. I guess the nearest parallel to supervision is code review. However, software failures generally occur after much greater elapsed time than the failures described in Gawande's book. So 'failure' clinics might not be practical. 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/
