Welcome to the Lounge

Quote:

In his excellent talk called “Real Software Engineering,”3 Glenn Vanderburg says that in other disciplines “Engineering means stuff that works” and that almost the opposite has become true for software.

Vanderburg goes on to explore why this is the case. He describes an academic approach to software engineering that was so onerous that almost no one who had practiced it would recommend it for future projects.

It was heavyweight and added no significant value to the process of software development at all. In a telling phrase, Vanderburg says:

[Academic software engineering] only worked because sharp people, who cared, were willing to circumvent the process.

That is not engineering by any sensible definition.

Vanderburg’s description of “engineering as the stuff that works” is important. If the practices that we choose to identify as “engineering” don’t allow us to make better software faster, then they don’t qualify as engineering!

Software development, unlike all physical production processes, is wholly an exercise in discovery, learning, and design. Our problem is one of exploration, and so we, even more than the spaceship designers, should be applying the techniques of exploration rather than the techniques of production engineering.