Re: [SystemSafety] Modelling and coding guidelines: "Unambiguous Graphical Representation"

From: Derek M Jones < >
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2016 20:27:09 +0000

Steve,

> Fascinating, because I argue that it's not at all difficult to write
> software that friggen' works: software that does what it's intended to do,

You seemed to have missed the point(s) of writing software. Or rather, are focusing on the reasons for using software.

> do so. The research I've done into contemporary software organizations
> shows that on average, over 60% of their capacity to do work is wasted in
> going back to fix stupid mistakes that they made earlier. We seem

I think you are suffering from survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Code has a finite lifetime, often surprisingly short. I think its often cheaper to fix faults in code that survives than invest lots of code, much of which does not survive.

Of course there is a cutoff point below so little has been invested that rewriting is cost effective.

> "There is a huge hole in the software engineering curriculum: Economics."
>
> Totally agreed. Maybe someone should write a book on that topic? Oh, waitŠ

That red door stopper is primarily customer oriented.

-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com
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Received on Thu Mar 03 2016 - 21:26:53 CET