Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!kodak!ektools!jim
From: jim@ektools.UUCP (James Hugh Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: A Cynic's Guide, part 1
Message-ID: <1114@ektools.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 88 14:52:13 GMT
Organization: Eastman Kodak, Dept. 47, Rochester N.Y.
Lines: 38
Keywords: user community

My own thoughts on what accounts for a significant part of the differences
in the state-of-the-art in hardware and software engineering is that hardware
engineers design for a much more intelligent group of users :-) .  My point
is that when hardware engineers do their surveys of their user community, 
they are dealing with people who are used to logically setting things down
in order, and usually have a significant of experience to bring to bear
on specifying what they need.  The software engineer on the other hand has
either marketing people, or the user themselves to deal with.  Users of 
computer based products range from those who are very intelligent and learn
from the software you have written (requesting more functionality almost as soon
as it is released), to those who know what they want to do, but do not
want to bother reading the manual, or taking the training course.  In either
case, building good, useful software in a timely manner is difficult.  I do
not apologize for software manager who are not willing to say no to marketing
people, nor for those not willing to invest in designing for reusability etc.

But for hardware engineers who think that software is easy, I leave you with
designing a microprocessor (based on any architecture) which has one 
additional instruction:

Pneumonic	Op Code		Description

DWIT		(Your choice)	Do what I think.

(This is not original, as most programmers recognize from various joke
 instruction sets which have circulated over the years.)

Another way of putting it is that users tend to pump water, back to the top
of the "Software development waterfall".

===============================================================================
James H. Moore					"Jesus is Lord"
Eastman Kodak Co.
Rochester NY 14650
...rutgers!rochester!kodak!ektools!jim
* All opinions expressed are my own, and do not represent an authorized 
 statement by Eastman Kodak Co. 
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