• JW (unregistered) in reply to It's particularly a necessity when working with limited resource

    Anonymous:
    When resources are tight, getting it right first time is really important

    Actually...

    In smaller environments the definition of "right" changes.  A LOT.  And what really is important is being able to adapt quickly to changing definitions of "right" without a lot of communication overhead, because that REALLY eats up resources.  You'd be amazed at how many meetings it can take to iron out small issues, depending on people's personalities and inclinations.

    I think people should ideally have an intuitive brain for design concepts and notions (particularly object-oriented programming); and running a design for a sub-component by someone should be as frivolous as running an arbitrary "if" statement by your co-worker.  Furthermore I don't think good design is "top-down," except on a VERY high level.  Most good design comes from applying good general principles up-front and refactoring subsystems to "grow" an architecture; as opposed to coming up with the Grand Architecture (which is especially crazy when you don't, and can't, know the actual product spec).

    Personally I think any such process that you're suggesting would be, and should be, ad hoc. 

  • Will Sargent (unregistered) in reply to Charles Nadolski

    University of Washington has an MS in Software Engineering.

  • Neil Ellis (unregistered) in reply to dubwai

    Well said. I  have spent years coding but have noticed that those who have spent time on maintanence work for periods of time gain a much deeper understanding of both coding and APIs. I'm stuck doing some maintanence at the moment, but it's a fascinating learning experience and encourages your to write better and better code.

    dubwai:

    So, even though it pissed me off when I started, doing maintenance was one of the best things I ever did.

    There seems to be some sort of commonly held fallacy in IT management that you have maintenance developers and new code developers and that they are completely different skill sets.

  • MMSS (unregistered) in reply to Charles Nadolski
    Charles Nadolski:
    And unfortunately, I have never seen a degree called "Software Engineering". 

    Actually, they just started offering it at my alma mater:

    http://www.cs.dal.ca/undergraduate/index.shtml

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