One Aging Geek

Monday, November 17, 2003

Joel on Software - Friday, November 14, 2003

Joel on Software - Friday, November 14, 2003

But don't give up hope. We do have the collective wisdom of fifty years of building software to draw from. Or at least, it's somewhere. Your typical startup with three pals from college may not exactly have the collective wisdom, so they're going to reinvent things from scratch that IBM figured out in 1961, or go bankrupt failing to reinvent them. Too bad, because they could have read Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, by Robert L. Glass, the best summary of what the software profession should have agreed upon by now. Here are just a few examples from the 55 facts and 10 fallacies in the book:
  • The most important factor in software work is not the tools and techniques used by the programmers, but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.
  • Adding people to a late project makes it later.
  • Reuse-in-the-small (libraries of subroutines) began nearly 50 years ago and is a well-solved problem.
  • Reuse-in-the-large (components) remains a mostly unsolved problem, even though everyone agrees it is important and desirable.