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
A grossly obese set of requirements Who advocates in the requirements process for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, it’s robustness? Often, no one. As often, an architect or engineer who can offer only opinion based on taste and instinct, unbuttressed as yet by facts. For in a classical Waterfall Model product process, requirements are set before design is begun. The result, of course, is a grossly obese set of requirements, the union of many wish lists, assembled without constraints. Usually, the list is neither prioritized nor weighted. The social forces in the committee forbid the painful conflicts occasioned by even weighting, much less prioritizing. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design Requirements proliferationA Plea for Lean Software features