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The Unwritten Rules Of Software Development
To misquote Churchill: why so many bugs have been created in so many applications by so few
I have a shameful confession: in one way or another I’ve spent the last 30+ years of my life being involved with software development, from complex enterprise-scale applications handling hundreds of transactions per second to smartphone apps developed for multi-million-user market segments. I’ve helped major corporations remediate poor implementations of well-known ERP systems and I’ve consulted to organizations to help them create the basic ground rules essential for reliable, scalable, and robust application development.
During all this time I’ve discovered there are some eternal verities when it comes to the wild and wonderful world of software engineering, and with your indulgence I’ll now share a few of these truths with you.
Verity Number One: senior executives and users alike think a brief demo is the same as a fully-functioning complex system, and can’t understand why the development team needs more than a week to implement what is obviously trivial and simple to deliver. Now that we’ve all supposedly adopted some flavor of Agile, it’s obvious that all executives have to do is specify the required features, when these will be delivered, and how many hours of…
