Software Engineering as a Craft An Article by Thomas Wilson thomaswilson.xyz The decreasingly tangible product of code, i.e. that all we have are files on a hard-drive, may make it easy to forget that writing software produces a thing. If you produce a wonky chair or an overly long fork, it’s easy to see the quality of work was not great. By calling for a perception of software as a craft, we fight against that ability to forget or not notice the final quality of the product. You could watch two software engineers with different levels of experience, or in different domains, and it wouldn’t necessarily be so easy to guess which is which, at least from a distance. So maybe there is something to be said for the value of software as a craft, for sometimes focusing on the practice of making better, or at least different, software just for the sake of it. craftsoftware
What's wrong with the rational model We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing The Constraints Keep Changing Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., What's Wrong With This Model? Changing constraintsDeciding what to designThe situation talks back