Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering es un reciente (2002) libro de Robert Glass donde enuncia 55 hechos y 10 falacias de la ingeniería de software, cuidadosamente indicando las fuentes de cada uno de ellos y antes presentando una discusión y controversias sobre el tema.

Es un libro muy valioso, porque realmente te abre la cabeza. Hay pocas verdades que pueden llegar a sorprender a cualquier persona que esta en el mundo del software hacer rato, es mas, hay verdades que pueden herir a mas de uno. Yo no estuve muy de acuerdo con varias de ellas. Lo mejor fue que muchas me sorprendieron gratamente, entre ellas verdades sobre el mantenimiento de las cuales escribí ayer.

El objetivo de este libro es hacer pensar a la gente, presentar estos hechos para que se pueda discutir y actuar sobre ellos para progresar. Lo considero esencial para cualquier practicante de la ingeniería del software.

Les dejo los hechos resumidos en una oración que obtuve del Blog Coding Horror:

People

1. The most important factor in software work is the quality of the programmers.
2. The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers.
3. Adding people to a late project makes it later.
4. The working environment has a profound impact on productivity and quality.

Tools and Techniques

5. Hype (about tools and technology) is a plague on the house of software.
6. New tools and techniques cause an initial loss of productivity / quality.
7. Software developers talk a lot about tools, but seldom use them.

Estimation

8. One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is poor estimation.
9. Software estimation usually occurs at the wrong time.
10. Software estimation is usually done by the wrong people.
11. Software estimates are rarely corrected as the project proceeds.
12. It is not surprising that software estimates are bad. But we live and die by them anyway!
13. There is a disconnect between software management and their programmers.
14. The answer to a feasability study is almost always "yes".

Reuse

15. Reuse-in-the-small is a solved problem.
16. Reuse-in-the-large remains a mostly unsolved problem.
17. Reuse-in-the-large works best in families of related systems.
18. Reuseable components are three times as hard to build and should be tried out in three different settings.
19. Modification of reused code is particularly error-prone.
20. Design pattern reuse is one solution to the problems of code reuse.

Requirements

23. One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is unstable requirements.
24. Requirements errors are the most expensive to fix during production.
25. Missing requirements are the hardest requirements errors to correct.

Design

26. Explicit requirements 'explode' as implicit requirements for a solution evolve.
27. There is seldom one best design solution to a software problem.
28. Design is a complex, iterative process. Initial design solutions are usually wrong and certainly not optimal.

Coding

29. Designer 'primitives' rarely match programmer 'primitives'.
30. COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others are so much worse.

Error removal

31. Error removal is the most time-consuming phase of the lifecycle.

Testing

32. Software is usually tested at best to the 55 to 60 percent coverage level.
33. 100 percent test coverage is still far from enough.
34. Test tools are essential, but rarely used.
35. Test automation rarely is. Most testing activities cannot be automated.
36. Programmer-created, built-in debug code is an important supplement to testing tools.

Reviews and Inspections

37. Rigorous inspections can remove up to 90 percent of errors before the first test case is run.
38. Rigorous inspections should not replace testing.
39. Post-delivery reviews, postmortems, and retrospectives are important and seldom performed.
40. Reviews are both technical and sociological, and both factors must be accommodated.

Maintenance

41. Maintenance typically consumes 40 to 80 percent of software costs. It is probably the most important software lifecycle phase.
42. Enhancements represent roughly 60 percent of maintenance costs.
43. Maintenance is a solution-- not a problem.
44. Understanding the existing product is the most difficult maintenance task.
45. Better methods lead to more maintenance, not less.

Quality

46. Quality is a collection of attributes.
47. Quality is not user satisfaction, meeting requirements, achieving cost and schedule, or reliability.

Reliability

48. There are errors that most programmers tend to make.
49. Errors tend to cluster.
50. There is no single best approach to software error removal.
51. Residual errors will always persist. The goal should be to minimize or eliminate severe errors.

Efficiency

52. Efficiency stems more from good design than good coding.
53. High-order language code can be about 90 percent as efficient as comparable assembler code.
54. There are tradeoffs between optimizing for time and optimizing for space.

Research

55. Many researchers advocate rather than investigate.

Para cerrar el artículo de hoy les dejo las 10 falacias:

1. You can't manage what you can't measure.
2. You can manage quality into a software product.
3. Programming can and should be egoless.
4. Tools and techniques: one size fits all.
5. Software needs more methodologies.
6. To estimate cost and schedule, first estimate lines of code.
7. Random test input is a good way to optimize testing.
8. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
9. The way to preduct future maintenance costs and to make product replacement decisions is to look at past cost data.
10. You teach people how to program by showing them how to write programs.