Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att!ihlpf!warren
From: warren@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Montgomery)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: "software engineers" -- case study (long)
Summary: more views from another DTSS alumnus
Message-ID: <8387@ihlpf.ATT.COM>
Date: 3 May 89 13:58:33 GMT
References: <854@odyssey.ATT.COM> <42fc20e4.183dc@apollo.COM>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 47

I read this group only occasionally but was fortunate enough to
stumble across Jim's posting on software engineering as practiced by
DTSS.  I worked at Dartmouth before him (when everything was done in
assembly) and have much the same feelings about the quality and
producitvity of the work done there.  In addition to his reasons,
I'd offer the following observations:

The student programmers were chosen very carefully based on
	the non-credit course and placed very carefully in
	assignments according to what skills they showed. 
	They were also there because they enjoyed the job, since it
	was not (during my era at least) seen as the route to fame
	in fortune it became in the early 1980's
	
New people worked as apprentices to experienced developers in small
	teams.  This allowed a lot better transfer of style and
	problem solving approaches than happens with typical job
	training programs.  It also meant that designs and code got
	reviewed by at least one other person who was an expert at
	the system being modified and could effectively critique the
	strategy and style issues instead of focussing on
	superficial issues as is more typical of such reviews in
	large efforts.
	
The primitive nature of the tools available (110 baud ttys and lots
	of batch compilation) forced people to be careful.  People
	read and hand interpreted programs before compiling, and
	built in lots of trace information that was useful in
	diagnosing problems when something did fail.
	
There were strong feelings of ownership and responsibility for the
	software.  Ownership went out of fashion with "egoless
	programming", but I think it worked well in this environment
	at least.  Programmers owned modules and when your module
	crashed, you got an octal dump in your inbox.  The culture
	dictated that you figure out what caused each dump and fix
	it.  Nobody liked being dumped on and everyone worked hard
	to keep their stack of unsolved dumps to a minimum.
	
As to why you don't hear from more DTSS people, lots of them went on
in other fields, and others are hacking away in various niches
without access to anything like netnews and no particular interest
in publishing.

-- 

Warren Montgomery ihlpf!warren