Dijkstra is now 980 Dollars an Ounce

Posted on March 4, 2008
Filed Under Computer Science |

I know of one –very successful– software firm in which it is a rule of the house that for a one-year project coding is not allowed to start before the ninth month! In this organization they know that the eventual code is no more than the deposit of your understanding. When I told its director that my main concern in teaching students computing science was to train them to think first and not to rush into coding, he just said, “If you succeed in doing so, you are worth your weight in gold.” (I am not very heavy).
Edsger Dijkstra- EWD648, page 8 published in 1982

A lot of people remember Dijkstra by his networking algorithm, but he spent a significant portion of his career studying the people aspect of software engineering. Problems that the software engineering discipline faces today were addressed by Dijkstra 30 years ago. For some reason, the solutions of the theoretical researchers just haven’t made their way into the large-scale coding shops, and we’re still seeing failed projects.

The best lesson I learned from my college programming — that I ignored in AP classes in high school — was to really sit down and plan. It’s not 100% necessary for any particular planning methodology to be used, whether it is database modeling, UML diagramming, etc. Any combination of them will work if they are sufficiently detailed.

The standard methodologies are important because they are an agreed-upon pretext for thinking before coding, not because they actually work 100% of the time. It’s up to the designers to take advantage of them.

All is not lost for the future, as smart people keep coming up with smart ways to manage software developers. Joel Spolsky and the Fog Creek team developed “Evidence Based Scheduling“, a methodology that, as a first step, requires the programmer to break the project into tasks that are less than 16 hours. I’ve tried this recently for a few personal projects, and it’s worked with a large degree of success.

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Comments

One Response to “Dijkstra is now 980 Dollars an Ounce”

  1. Greg Molyneux on March 4th, 2008 3:05 pm

    1982 was a very good year.

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