Re: Re: Development: A Structured Problem Area?

Greg Jorgensen <gregj-/VAaTXopHTZWk0Htik3J/w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
>
> In 25 years of professional programming I have never seen formal 
> requirements or specifications that were worth the time spent on 
> them. Having the programmer(s) work directly with the customer/user, 
> possibly with a skilled analyst acting as mediator, always (in my 
> experience) leads to a better result. Without that interaction 
> projects either fail or turn into death marches.

I'm only a couple of years behind you and I couldn't agree more.  However in 
medicine, it took centuries of blood-letting, chants and snake-oil sales before 
the populous was willing to accept that the human body was too complex and 
there were too many variations from person to person for simple rule-based 
diagnoses and treatment solutions.

Doctors, with their unstructured body of experience, thus are allowed to occupy 
a rare nitche that is far less susceptible to automation than most and thus 
remains very expensive.  It is quite reasonable then for non-programmers to 
assume that this is the exception to the rule and that software development, 
like most other jobs can be greatly simplified and automated thus making it 
cheaper.

However, having had some training and experience in the medical field, I find 
the processes used in both endevours to be largely identical.  The difference 
is only in the body of  knowledge (i.e. the data).  When I'm debugging a 
program, I'm using the same reasoning, testing and diagnostic processes as a 
doctor.  And to the health of the business or organization, that software is 
usually just as important as a person's health.

Since everything happens much faster these days, it should only take a few more 
years for management to realize that spending prodigious amounts of time and 
money on use cases and other specs results in the software being written twice 
-- once by the analyst in the form of specs and again by the programmers in the 
actual code.  They will also come to realize that a version of "the telephone 
game" happens here and is the source of a lot of the discrepancy between what 
the users thought they communicated and what actually gets implemented.

My 2 cents.
Robert Watson



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