Posted by
Pete McBreen
11 Nov 2009 at 07:48
Seen a few useful blogs on documentation recently.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss has a good look at how the Django culture does documentation.
I especially liked this
Auto-generated documentation is almost worthless. At best it’s a slightly improved version of simply browsing through the source, but most of the time it’s easier just to read the source than to navigate the bullshit that these autodoc tools produce.
My take is that it is possible to produce readable and useful documentation using Rdoc or Javadoc, it is just that most projects do no take the time to produce good documentation. In many cases of Rdoc generated documentation all that is there is the signature to the method and a link to that excerpt of the code… not very useful.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
17 Oct 2009 at 20:44
I met Chris Matts a few years ago and his REal Options ideas stuck with me but I never remembered to link to him.
His Blog is called decision-coach, and he has a very interesting approach to copyright
Terms and Conditions for Copying, Distribution and Modification
- Do whatever you like.
Chris seems to be going to be using a cartoon approach that shows promise, though it looks as if the book will have professionally drawn cartoons - personally I’d miss the hand drawn versions. The idea of when to design tests is covered in the Information Arrival cartoon, which is a long but worthwhile read.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
08 Oct 2009 at 11:28
Seems that there is still a lot of resistance to using TDD.
Uncle Bob explaining the role of TDD in developing Fitnesse makes for interesting reading.
The bottom line is that TDD is a design technique but should not be the sole design technique. All the old design rules and skills still apply; and TDD is a powerful way to inform and augment them.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
07 Oct 2009 at 22:09
Not much time to post recently, but have to note an interesting post about Software Artisans and Handmade Software
Had to smile at the thought the calling yourself a Software Artisan was pretentious. If they think that is pretentious what would they think about calling yourself a Software Craftsman?
Posted by
Pete McBreen
03 Oct 2009 at 19:14
No Thanks Google
How Do I Disable Sidewiki?
Comments are deliberately turned off on this blog, but now Google wants to enable commenting via Sidewiki so that anyone can put comments directly in view while others browse what I have written.
NOT a good idea.
As Dave Winers says my Website Is My Space
Possible way to disable Sidewiki
Google site states “Sidewiki currently does not support comments over internal or SSL (https) encrypted pages.” So that might be a temporary fix - making the entire site SSL, but again there is the word “currently” which means that it might at some point allow for comments on SSL pages....
Posted by
Pete McBreen
03 Oct 2009 at 07:23
Ivar Jacobsen has an interesting piece in Dr Dobbs - Why We Need a Theory for Software Engineering.
I’d have thought that 40 years after the initial NATO conferences on Software Engineering, someone would already have the theory well developed by now. Setting aside my bias for a while, teh article has some really good questions
Do we really know how to develop great software? The answer for many people is clearly yes. But do we know how to communicate and continuously improve the way that we develop software? Do we really understand the best way to communicate and share our knowledge?
Do we stand on quicksand or the shoulders of giants?
Have you ever taken the time to investigate a new method or practice only to find that it is just the re-branding and regurgitation of ideas that you have seen many times before?
Have you ever got frustrated that every new idea about software development seems to be at the expense and in aggressive competition with everything that has gone before?
Does it seem to you that following that latest software development trend has become more important than producing great software?
I sense a certain amount of frustration in these questions, because over the last 40+ years it sometimes seems that little progress has been made in our ability to reliably develop software. Admittedly my answer to these questions does not include the answer “Software Engineering”, but other than that I find I share the sentiment expressed in the article…
It is clear that we need to stop chasing after fads and easy answers that forever disappoint, and that we need to do it without discouraging innovation and the generation of new ideas. People need to stop constantly re-packaging and re-branding old ideas just for the sake of it. Instead they should focus on helping people understand how to build great software.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
22 Sep 2009 at 20:28
Neil Tyson talks about the argument from ignorance
Beautiful quote from Neil - “Optical Illusions are Brain Failures”
Video on YouTube
Posted by
Pete McBreen
22 Sep 2009 at 20:10
I just love this Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate from Gojko Adzic
What is really amazing about this particular time is that serious people whom I respect seem to be arguing for certification, with the idea that certification is coming anyway so it’s better if the community gets on board and influences it rather than ignoring it and suffering after. To that I can only say that people do drugs anyway but it’s still not OK for us to sell it to them.
It seems that there is now a move afoot to make Certified Scrum Developers… The World Agile Qualifications Board .. words fail me.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
22 Sep 2009 at 20:04
Alan Cooper on Agile
“I’ve long been an advocate of such technological-craftsman-self-determination. It’s just that I advocated it via the “interaction design†point of view. ”
Posted by
Pete McBreen
20 Sep 2009 at 09:02
A general observation from Scalzi,
The Internet does seem to be full of people whose knowledge of complex concepts appears limited to a dictionary definition.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
15 Sep 2009 at 18:28
Decentralizing social media s likely to become a hot topic.
Dave WIner has created RssCloud to enable more or less real time RSS updates and notifications, helping to decentralize the notification system. Twitter was an interesting model for a while, but it has demonstrated that it does not scale to a real flash mob. Sure it works well for large traffic volumes, but when there is a massive spike in traffic the centralized model is always going to be in danger of slowing down.
At some level high traffic is indistinguishable from a denial of service attack, sure the traffic is wanted, but if the servers cannot handle it, then the system exhibits the same behaviors that it would under a real denial of service attack - no new traffic gets through in a timely manner.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
12 Sep 2009 at 20:23
Saw this a while back but forgot to link to it.
In Defense Of The Software Craftsmanship Concept by Alan Skorkin
What about simply writing clean, nice code and doing it quickly and well. While I would love to say that anyone can do it no matter how ‘old’ they are, I would be lying if I did. Any developer who has ever looked at code they themselves wrote 1, 2 or 3 years ago will tell you that this is one skill that you can hone and improve until the day you, errr — become a manager (don’t bite my head off, i am only kidding :)). The point is, having a skill that you can continue to improve for as long as you’re able is the very definition of craftsmanship.
Other than the subtle jibe at managers, a nice summary of software craftsmanship.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
05 Sep 2009 at 16:44
Stumbled across this paper from the 1969 NATO Software Engineering conference that indicates that even back then someone was thinking that maybe engineering was not the right metaphor for software development
Unlike the first conference, at which it was fully accepted that the term software engineering expressed a need rather than a reality, in Rome there was already a slight tendency to talk as if the subject already existed. And it became clear during the conference that the organizers had a hidden agenda, namely that of persuading NATO to fund the setting up of an International Software Engineering Institute. However things did not go according to their plan. The discussion sessions which were meant to provide evidence of strong and extensive support for this proposal were instead marked by considerable scepticism, and led one of the participants, Tom Simpson of IBM, to write a splendid short satire on ”Masterpiece Engineering”. –Brian Randell
Since then we have endured 40 years of people pushing the software engineering ideas on us, and in spite of all that projects still have major stresses.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
03 Sep 2009 at 19:40
Lecturing Birds on Flying is another take on Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan idea, and Pablo Triana does a good job of explaining that a lot of what was supposedly solid theory around financial modeling, is actually not applicable in the real world.
It turns out that most models make the assumption that the probabilities that apply in markets are normally distributed (where anything beyond a three sigma event should be exceedingly rare), is incorrect and that the probability distribution has very “fat tails”, where a twenty-five sigma event is not unheard of. This work complements Nassim’s black swan book by restating the ideas in a slightly different way and by being written after another event that demonstrates that the markets do not have normally distributed probabilities.
The applicability to software craftsmanship stands out for me in the way that the models try to ignore the effect that individuals have on the market. The assumption is made that the actions of individuals are all independent, when it is blindingly obvious that this is not the case. Yes, the assumptions might work if the market was made up of lots of small players, but that is not the case. The markets only have a few players of any significance, the trades of any of these make the markets move, the small players make the random day to day noise, but the big players are what cause the problems - the too big to fail kind of problems.
Software Engineering is too big to fail
To get a good software disaster, you need the big ideas from software engineering that can influence lots of people to make similar mistakes on a project. The average level of software development is abysmal, most projects only succeed to the extent that they have one or two talented or experienced developers who manage to overcome the overall lure of failure.
Software projects should be built around the outliers that happen to be talented or experienced enough to succeed, but even then the sponsors should only bet as much as they can afford to lose. Nobody knows how to make massive projects successful - other than throwing money at it until it is politically acceptable to call the result successful.
The issues in software are different than in finance, but in both cases the underlying model of how the field works is incorrect, and the consequences of this mismatch between model and reality are what causes things to crash and burn.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
02 Sep 2009 at 18:41
Sometimes it seems that it is very hard to admit to not knowing something. It is as if having a convincing tale to tell about something is more important than actually being correct.
Explanations are listened to
Unfortunately this is true even when the explanations are based on pure guesswork, and potentially have no grounding in reality.
Nobody quotes the people who do not know
Most media are interested in the quick soundbite that explains an event, they are not interested in anyone who says that the causes are complex, interrelated and not amenable to a quick fix.
Maybe the best methodology is None of the Above
Most of the methodologies I have seen appear to be just guesses about what might work, but they are presented as it they are the one true solution to all our software development problems. Some methodologies allow for experimentation and as such are partially admitting that they do not know for sure, but it is a rare event for practitioners of any methodology to admit that maybe alternate approaches may be more suitable for a project.
While not advocating a roll your own methodology approach, I do advocate admitting that we do not know what really works for software development projects. Sure we know a few ways to Crash and burn projects, but that is not the same as knowing how to make a project succeed.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
01 Sep 2009 at 19:51
Finally managed to restore this site after the original hosting site went away.
On the positive side, the backup_blog.rb script that I wrote several years ago proved to work first time with this new version of typo (5.3), so all of the old blog postings are now available again.
Now all I need to do is remember to post to this blog on a regular schedule again.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
16 May 2008 at 20:04
A nice article about the problems with UML, including the issue that it has an 800 page specification. In all 13 points are listed, some of which may be the reason that UML is not used much these days.
UML can still be useful for sketching out ideas on a whiteboard, but the way that most CASE tools operate it is hard to just sketch out ideas.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
05 May 2008 at 20:03
One to ponder: We don’t know how to program
File this under the same category as Jack Reeves The source code is the design - Yes I know that is not quite the title for the article, but that has always been the way I think about this article. The actual title is “What Is Software Design?”
Paul Johnson points out that there is no real process for software development because most of it is design and nobody really has a process for that, since it occurs in the heads of the designers. I would also add that it also occurs in the conversations between designers and other people, because sometimes it is external ideas that spark great designs.
Overall though there is no process, and just like other design disciplines, software development is best learned through apprenticeship to a great designer.
