Software Engineer?
What amazes me is how business continues to demand more features in less time (cost) and are then surprised when they end up with lots of unhappy customers having to deal with a bug ridden code base.
What doesn’t help is how so called “software engineers“ and “software architects“ seem oblivious to this. The solution they say is to simplify the interface by wrapping these objects together with those or hell no – “We’ll switch to C# and all the memory allocation issues and strange runtime behavioral problems will be sorted on a managed platform.”
“C++ is complicated programming language and developers either don’t understand it or abuse it. We’ll wrap objects and have a simple interface.”
Who the hell are they trying to kid?
What happened to system requirements analysis and understanding?
What happened to a detail requirements document / specification?
Where’s the detailed design? All developers need to be on the same page!
Object modeling – interfaces – data flow – extensibility – security?
How does this design improve on the last?
How are we going to debug this complicated system of interfaces and data flows?
Performance, traceability, verification, validation, software lifetime.
Are you sure this is engineering? Somehow I’d say that current development practices are by far nothing more than hacking! Professionals who get paid a bucket load of money are designing the systems which control our everyday existence are screwing up!
What happens when the boss finds out that the system is poorly designed or doesn’t meet the requirements? The boss gets a new “software architect” – most likely a “consultant” to redesign the system – probably a complete rewrite!Contract over, consultant paid – he’s out of door and onto the next software crisis and the business it left with no real guarantee that they’re better off with the redesign!Have you noticed that the big boys like Microsoft don’t issue a real software guarantee?
But rest assured, you’ll be rewriting the system again a year or two later.
Somehow I don’t think a civil engineer would dream of telling his boss that they’ll need to rebuild the bridge in year or two even five for that matter.
So how can programmers call themselves engineers?
I’ve had some programmers openly admit that they ‘hack‘ the code because they’re not quite sure how it works but the fix / addition does the the job so what’s the problem?
Many years ago, experts in the community called this the “Software Crisis“.
Well I’d say this crisis is far from over! It still exists today and it is only going to get worse!
Software projects are getting larger because there are now hardware platforms which have the ability to process a couple million of lines of code (MLOC) in a fraction of a second. Next year there’ll be hardware that does a whole lot more!
Will the software development processes and techniques of today have improved sufficiently to enable the delivery of larger projects with a less bugs tomorrow?
I don’t think so! So loose the “engineer” – you don’t deserve it!
