Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!cbnews!military
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: The 2167 development spec
Message-ID: <11491@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 17 Nov 89 06:10:06 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
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Approved: military@att.att.com



From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: budden@manta.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg)
>...the basics of 2167A software production
>are the same as you will find in a modern software engineering
>textbook...  Essentially, top-down design by the numbers,
>with full documentation at each stage of the development...

In other words, a model of software development that is increasingly felt
to be obsolete:  the notion that you can pre-plan the software in such
detail that it will automatically work and be optimal.  There is a large
and growing faction that considers this concept unworkable self-deception.
Mistakes and redesign are inevitable, and recognition of this leads to
vastly superior results.  But if you've got to rework 500 pages of
documentation first, well, maybe the original code is "good enough for
government work" after all.

Documentation by the ton does not guarantee good software.  (Especially
when the documentation is probably written hastily after the fact, like
flowcharts always were.)  What it guarantees is software that is too
rigid to change... and change is inevitable.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu