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Trouble is, "good design" is pretty hard to quantify. It's much much harder to quantify than things like LOC, or whether this milestone or that was reached. An
by pmccool 16y ago
Trouble is, "good design" is pretty hard to quantify. It's much much harder to quantify than things like LOC, or whether this milestone or that was reached.
Another difference is that a basketball game has a definite, qualitative outcome. That, at least, can be measured. With software development you don't even have that luxury.
- eru 16y agoDid you mean, "a definite, [quantitative] outcome"?
- pmccool 16y agoYes. Oops.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoQuite so, there's no objective measure for good software, other than perhaps sales (and it's enormously difficult to trace sales data back to individual contributions from one out of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of devs). Which is why software development is still very much a craft. And a pretty esoteric one at that. It often takes the subjective judgment of a known good developer to determine the quality of another developer's contribution. The unfortunate side effect of this is that the really good dev shops (populated by talented devs even in management roles) are working at levels many, many orders of magnitude beyond what the run of the mill dev shops are capable of. There are a great many development projects managed or overseen by non-developers, and many of those people lack the basic skills necessary to tell the difference between gold and utter crap. It's no surprise then that so much "enterprise-y" development is little more than snake oil, VBA scripts and MS access duct taped together and sold for millions of dollars to big companies who don't have the skills to know they got taken for a ride. Software development is only just barely scratching its way out of its alchemy and astrology phase. There are far more untalented, unskilled hacks out there than there are honest craftsmen.