Comments on: Emergent Design & Professional Software Development

By: let x=x › Code re-writes and U.S. health care reform

let x=x › Code re-writes and U.S. health care reform — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 08:24:56 +0000

[...] of our professional practices should be the delivery of incremental design to systems. Instead of that 4 month re-write of a small section of functionality could we have delivered it in [...]

By: Scot Mcphee

Scot Mcphee — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:56:48 +0000

Well Ben,

Yes you might be right. Certainly about the Universities, which should be teaching their students ‘how to be good programmers’ first and foremost not ‘how to write XYZ language or feature’. It’s the old adage about being taught how to think, research, find out for yourself – it’s what supposedly separates a University from a TAFE. Allegedly.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:26:14 +0000

I think you are exagerating those figures. I would contend that far less than 1/4 developers unit test — could be even as little as 1/10 when you take into account the non-java world.

As for VCS — The biggest trouble is that it isn’t taught at most universities/courses, and as such very few people understand basic things such as conflict resolution.

I guess this makes it a good litmus test for people who are able to learn outside a formal environment

By: let x=x › Programmerless programming is just a mirage

let x=x › Programmerless programming is just a mirage — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:09:29 +0000

[...] big issue I see with these systems is that they tend to be highly resistant to modern programming principles and practices. For example, test-driven design – or even simple unit testing. Sure, if you’re building a [...]

By: let x=x › Unit testing as a discipline

let x=x › Unit testing as a discipline — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:50:03 +0000

[...] In Emergent Design Scott L. Bain dedicates a chapter to ‘Paying attention to Disciplines: Unit testing‘. To an experienced agilist this may seem a little basic: of course the discipline of unit testing pays dividends! But I think that we agilists forget sometimes that there are still many programmers – or their management – who don’t value the investment needed to get the extensive returns of unit testing and test driven development (let alone test driven design). [...]

By: scot

scot — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:11:51 +0000

Bain’s book is definitely worth reading. The thing that I took away from it, that gave me the most value, was the idea “what a profession is” (a unique body of knowledge, processes and practices) and the organisation of software development as a profession. All the specific ideas, like test-driven design, and so forth are already known to most agilists or other self-aware programmers (I wish I could say “all programmers”, but alas, your statistics are probably right Robert!), but the insight in Bain’s book is the gathering of all these things into the idea of the “profession”.

As programmers we need to start developing the idea of “professional practice”. And I, like Bain, and probably you too, would say there’s a bunch of basic things we can do get started. Until we do we’re just a bunch of witchdoctors sprinkling chicken blood (aka spaghetti code) over our victims and chanting the magical incantations (“it compiles, it ships!”).

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:21:24 +0000

Unfortunately, industry “best practice” (a sad term in itself) is pretty poorly distributed. Even version control is only used by something like 50% of development shops, despite the availability of good free VCS solutions. Unit testing is in the <25% category. Good quality automated acceptance testing is probably <1%.

Bain’s book is on my “to-get” list (a list that never gets shorter, alas). It does sounds very interesting.