Thus spake glen e. p. ropella circa 16/02/09 16:02 PM > The next trick is to transition ... to more > formal, repeatable, and communicable processes.
There are no such things. Formal only applies in the small number of cases where the domain you are trying to understand and in which your software is to be deployed is itself a formal system; e.g. compilers, OS kernels and most utilities, and the kind of programming done by systems programmers focused on the machine itself. Repeatable is a myth, a religion actually, pushed by Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute with their Capability Maturity Model and their fellow travelers. Repeatable applies only to production processes and software development is not a production process. (It involves, in a fairly trivial way, a production process.) Communicable is a totally local phenomenon - that is to say that a team of people working on a project can establish communication among themselves and can establish a group consensus of "what it all means" but that knowledge is NOT transmittable to others not a part of the group. In fact, if the group holding the knowledge disbands and reconvenes after some period of time (as short as six months) it is not communicable to themselves. Forty years of empirical evidence to the contrary - the software development field still insists that engineering is a good metaphor for what most software developers do. It is a terrible metaphor. > Just remember to be > skeptical Absolutely! > dave west ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
