> Surprisingly, the root cause of bad software has less to do with specific engineering choices, and more to do with how development projects are managed. The worst software projects often proceed in a very particular way:
> The project owners start out wanting to build a specific solution and never explicitly identify the problem they are trying to solve. ...
At this point, it looks like the article will reveal specific techniques for problem identification. Instead, it wraps this nugget in a lasagna of other stuff (hiring good developers, software reuse, the value of iteration), without explicitly keeping the main idea in the spotlight at all times.
Take the first sentences in the section "Reusing Software Lets You Build Good Things Quickly":
> Software is easy to copy. At a mechanical level, lines of code can literally be copied and pasted onto another computer. ...
By the time the author has finished talking about open source and cloud computing, it's easy to have forgotten the promise the article seemed to make: teaching you how to identify the problem to be solved.
The section returns to this idea in the last paragraph, but by then it's too little too late:
> You cannot make technological progress if all your time is spent on rebuilding existing technology. Software engineering is about building automated systems, and one of the first things that gets automated away is routine software engineering work. The point is to understand what the right systems to reuse are, how to customise them to fit your unique requirements, and fixing novel problems discovered along the way.
I would re-write this section by starting with a sentence that clearly states the goal - something like:
"Paradoxically, identifying a software problem will require your team to write software. But the software you write early will be quite different than the software you put into production. Your first software iteration will be a guess, more or less, designed to elicit feedback from your target audience and will deliberately built in great haste. Later iterations will solve the real problem you uncover and will emphasize quality. Still, you cannot make technical progress, particularly at the crucial fact-gathering stage, if all your time is spent on rebuilding existing technology. Fortunately, there are two powerful sources of prefabricated software you can draw from: open source and cloud computing."
The remainder of the section would then give specific examples, and skip the weirdly simpleminded introductory talk.
More problematically, though, the article lacks an overview of the process the author will be teaching. Its lack makes the remaining discussion even harder to follow. I'll admit to guessing the author's intent for the section above.
Unfortunately, the entire article is structured so as to prevent the main message ("find the problem first") from getting through. As a result, the reader is left without any specific action to take today. S/he might feel good after having read the article, but won't be able to turn the author's clear experience with the topic into something that prevents more bad software from entering the world.
> The project owners start out wanting to build a specific solution and never explicitly identify the problem they are trying to solve. ...
At this point, it looks like the article will reveal specific techniques for problem identification. Instead, it wraps this nugget in a lasagna of other stuff (hiring good developers, software reuse, the value of iteration), without explicitly keeping the main idea in the spotlight at all times.
Take the first sentences in the section "Reusing Software Lets You Build Good Things Quickly":
> Software is easy to copy. At a mechanical level, lines of code can literally be copied and pasted onto another computer. ...
By the time the author has finished talking about open source and cloud computing, it's easy to have forgotten the promise the article seemed to make: teaching you how to identify the problem to be solved.
The section returns to this idea in the last paragraph, but by then it's too little too late:
> You cannot make technological progress if all your time is spent on rebuilding existing technology. Software engineering is about building automated systems, and one of the first things that gets automated away is routine software engineering work. The point is to understand what the right systems to reuse are, how to customise them to fit your unique requirements, and fixing novel problems discovered along the way.
I would re-write this section by starting with a sentence that clearly states the goal - something like:
"Paradoxically, identifying a software problem will require your team to write software. But the software you write early will be quite different than the software you put into production. Your first software iteration will be a guess, more or less, designed to elicit feedback from your target audience and will deliberately built in great haste. Later iterations will solve the real problem you uncover and will emphasize quality. Still, you cannot make technical progress, particularly at the crucial fact-gathering stage, if all your time is spent on rebuilding existing technology. Fortunately, there are two powerful sources of prefabricated software you can draw from: open source and cloud computing."
The remainder of the section would then give specific examples, and skip the weirdly simpleminded introductory talk.
More problematically, though, the article lacks an overview of the process the author will be teaching. Its lack makes the remaining discussion even harder to follow. I'll admit to guessing the author's intent for the section above.
Unfortunately, the entire article is structured so as to prevent the main message ("find the problem first") from getting through. As a result, the reader is left without any specific action to take today. S/he might feel good after having read the article, but won't be able to turn the author's clear experience with the topic into something that prevents more bad software from entering the world.