Thursday, July 30, 2009

How's this for software development.?

A joker named Bob Clark was in a test section. He helped test some safety-critical software. This necessitated doing his own builds. So he was self-taught in how to refine the software so it would be ready to ship.





He became section leader of the development section.


Work was a dream for the team with his leadership.


He built the software at a fixed time each day.


He ran the build on a separate computer and demo'ed each supposed change.


If a particular change didn't look right, all the code for that code change was dropped.


The new development baseline was the old baseline plus code changes that looked like they worked.


This might seem too simplistic but it worked beautifully. It was light-years ahead of what we'd been doing for the past few years.


Clark posted overseas. New section leader


was a disaster.


(Didn't stay with the methodology that worked.


Descartes said each (successful) step he took served as a rule for what to do next.

How's this for software development.?
Doesn't seem like Clark's methodolgy was all that advanced. Consider the new eXtreme programming methodology. It has partial elements of it but doesn't seem that is was light years ahead.


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