"Gosi" <gosinn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:201a8d67-1155-480b-ad2e-8521ad6a7a1d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Looking at baggage handling systems turned up interesting articles.
>
> It looks like software practices is a lot of woodoo.
>
> The real world and software world have not met yet.
>
> http://www.westword.com/2007-08-30/news/dia-conspiracies-take-off/full
>
> "on average every line of code developed needs to be rewritten once,"
> bemoaned an internal FAA report.
>
> http://www.cis.gsu.edu/~mmoore/CIS3300/handouts/SciAmSept1994.html
>
> Capability Maturity Model (CMM). "It provides a vision of software
> engineering and management excellence,"
> The CMM uses a five-level scale, ranging from chaos at level 1 to the
> paragon of good management at level 5
> "The vast majority-about 75 percent-are still stuck in level 1,"
> Curtis reports. "They have no formal process, no measurements of what
> they do and no way of knowing when they are on the wrong track or off
> the track altogether."
>
> "Denver's airport planners saddled BAE with $20 million worth of
> changes to the design of its baggage system long after construction
> had begun. IBM has been similarly bedeviled by the indecision of FAA
> managers. Both companies naively assumed that once their design was
> approved, they would be left in peace to build it."
>
> "formal methods can guarantee only that software meets its
> specification, not that it can handle the surprises of the real
> world."
>
> "developers test a program by running it the way they intend it to be
> used, which often bears scant resemblance to real-world conditions"
>
> "mature engineering fields codify proved solutions in handbooks so
> that even novices can consistently handle routine designs, freeing
> more talented practitioners for advanced projects. No such handbook
> yet exists for software, so mistakes are repeated on project after
> project, year after year."
>
> "Programmers have for decades used libraries of subroutines to avoid
> rewriting the same code over and over. But these components break down
> when they are moved to a different programming language, computer
> platform or operating environment. "The tragedy is that as hardware
> becomes obsolete, an excellent expression of a sorting algorithm
> written in the 1960s has to be rewritten,"
>
> "buyers want to pay for a component once and make copies for free."
>
> "Basic things like designing code inspections, producing user
> documentation and maintaining aging software are not covered in
> academia,"
>
It's all in Fred P. Brooks Jr's book :The Mythical Man-Month, a bundle of
essays
on software engineering. Re-bundled & published by Addison-Wesley in 1995
(after
250.000 sales !!) and appearing as 11th printing in 1999. More than ever
worth
being read, but nobody seemed to have taken the contents at heart.
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