Bell Lab
ESS-1 SW Engineer, from an electronic background.
What's the matter with you software people?
" ... everything we were doing had the unstated goal of moving the hard stuff out of the hardware into the software."
Founder of the "Atlantic Systems Guild"
Early work on SW design metrics now no longer supported !
Now apply “You can’t control what you can’t measure” to the teenager. Most things that really matter—honor, dignity, discipline, personality, grace under pressure, values, ethics, resourcefulness, loyalty, humor, kindness—aren’t measurable. You must steer your child as best you can without much metric feedback. It’s hard, but then parenting is hard. You get a little bit of measurement in the form of school grades, and you’re grateful for it. But you also know that your child’s math grade is a better indicator of achievement than his Spanish grade, because math understanding is easier to measure. And his “grade” in comportment is much more likely to tell you something about the teacher than about the child.
.... So far, I’ve mostly discussed software engineering’s metric component. How about the rest? I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an idea whose time has come and gone. I still believe it makes excellent sense to engineer software. But that isn’t exactly what software engineering has come to mean. The term encompasses a specific set of disciplines including defined process, inspections and walkthroughs, requirements engineering, traceability matrices, metrics, precise quality control, rigorous planning and tracking, and coding and documentation standards. All these strive for consistency of practice and predictability.
Consistency and predictability are still desirable, but they haven’t ever been the most important things. For the past 40 years, for example, we’ve tortured ourselves over our inability to finish a software project on time and on budget. But as I hinted earlier, this never should have been the supreme goal. The more important goal is transformation, creating software that changes the world or that transforms a company or how it does business. We’ve been rather successful at transformation, often while operating outside our control envelope. Software development is and always will be somewhat experimental. The actual software construction isn’t necessarily experimental, but its conception is. And this is where our focus ought to be. It’s where our focus always ought to have been.
Classic book : Peopleware
February 1, 1999
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major
issues of software development are human, not technical. Their answers
aren't easy--just incredibly successful.
Other publications :
1979. Structured Analysis and System Specification. Prentice Hall, ISBN 0138543801
1986. Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates. Prentice Hall,
ISBN 0131717111
1987.
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. With Timothy Lister. Dorset House.
ISBN 978-0932633439
1997. The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management. Dorset House.
2001. Slack, Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency.
2003. Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects.
With Tim Lister. Dorset House in March, 2003.
2008. Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior.
With Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson, Steve McMenamin.
ISBN 978-0932633675
2009. "
Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?".
IEEE Software, Viewpoints. July/August 2009. pages 94–95.
