Matt's Ground Truth - All Comments

re: Why Is Software Development Different? (and hard)

Erich von Hauske — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:35:37 GMT

"getting excited about the same fundamental principles over and over again"

I believe that we get excited about them because they solve the problems we have in "simple" ways we didn't know; we should've known them!, yes, but nobody taught them to us in college. In part because there's little formalization of knowledge (the SWEBOK started in 1998 for example) and because knowledge is very scattered.

This last point gets exacerbated by the fact that we LOVE the Internet and for that we are more sensitive to the misinformation effect of the Internet.

re: Why Is Software Development Different? (and hard)

Ben — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:12:22 GMT

Part of the problem is that a badly made bridge will, generally, look wrong (although they do get made!) but badly written software doesn't necessarily look any different from well written software. It is harder to spot.

Also, as you say, the barrier to entry to stupidly low so that people who don't normally write code can still get stuff done. Conversely, you can't get an accountant who decides to have a go at building a new kind of smelter in their spare time.

Put these two together and you have a recipe for chaos. It's a miracle anything works at all!

re: Throw Away Your Gantt Charts!

Susan — Sun, 20 May 2007 19:48:54 GMT

This made me smile. I work as a software consultant at a company whose management loves Gantt charts. The software group is forced to have painful reviews of the schedule every couple of months. And, of course, none of the developers take these schedules seriously because they are so poorly estimated. Fortunately, I work with some rebels, so we do our own informal 2-week iteration plans behind the scenes. This has been much more useful to the group than all the Gantt charts lining the recycle bins.