On Fri, 2011-02-18 at 12:27 +0000, Ian wrote: > 2) Culture. In the West, a designer will decide the architecture of a > major system, and it is a basis > for debate and progress. If he gets it wrong, it is not a personal > disgrace or career limiting. If it is > nearly right, then that is a major success. In Japan, the architecture > has to be a debated and agreed. > This takes ages, costs lots, and ultimately fails. The failure is > because architecture is always a trade off - > there is no perfect answer.
I find this really interesting - we spend quite a lot of time studying the Toyota production system and seeing how we can do programming work in a similar way, and it's worked fairly well for us (Kanban, Genchi Genbutsu, eliminating Muda & Mura, etc). I would have expected Japanese software to have worked quite smoothly, with continuous improvement taking in everybody's opinions etc - although I suppose that if production never starts because the improvements are done to a spec, rather than the product, it would be a massive hindrance. Tim Wintle -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
