Borklog: One entry


5 December 2001

One of the denizens of #openacs is contemplating getting "extremecode.com". He's a college student that does tcl and java. NASA does truly extreme code. It's interested to compare this article (which talks about the mature, documentation-heavy development process used for the shuttle software) with the Linus Torvalds / Linux thingie from yesterday. They're both valid approaches to software development. One statement from the NASA article
Most organizations launch into even big projects without planning what the software must do in blueprint-like detail. So after coders have already started writing a program, the customer is busily changing its design.
which in one sense (conveyed by the article) this is a Bad Thing - that fully designing from the outset is the key to a mature software development process. It can also be a Good Thing (as espoused by the Extreme Programming crew). For some software, you can't know enough about the problem to be solved to fully design it before-hand. e.g. something that is used in a rapidly changing business market (say ebay's interface and infrastructure) vs something with relatively static and very well-defined boundaries (the space shuttle software).
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