Improve the Software Profession

Beyond Legacy Code — Pragmatic Programmers (155 / 160)

👈 Walk the Straight and Narrow | TOC | Beyond Agile 👉

We need to understand what’s important and what’s unimportant in software development. We need to focus on sharing principles and practices that are learnable and understandable in order to build the discipline of software development — to make it a true profession.

This is true in every other form of engineering. Skilled tradespeople like electricians or plumbers follow time-honored standards and practices, and the people who created these standards and practices were not solely looking for the fastest and most efficient way of achieving results. They were looking for other factors as well, not the least of which is public safety. They have to properly tap into a municipal water supply and sewer system or the power grid, and those standards are clearly communicated and actionable.

Electricians won’t charge you as much to install a single light fixture as they would to rewire a whole house. We all know that some physical things are difficult to change and other things are easy.

But in the less tangible virtual world of software, most nondevelopers have a hard time grasping this and find it difficult to identify the things that are easy to change and those that are difficult.

The software development community sort of closed down in the 1990s. New techniques for building better software came to be considered a competitive edge, but this really isn’t a healthy approach. Companies should focus on keeping their proprietary software proprietary but not their methodologies. We should share methodologies across our industry. That’s the only way our industry can improve quickly. It works for other industries and it can work for software development as well. Fortunately, I see some of the biggest companies freely sharing methodologies.

The world is looking to us in the software industry to step up and the individuals within the industry — within the profession of software development — have to step up and support one another. We have to regulate ourselves. If we fail to do this, the government might try to step in and regulate us — and that would be even more disastrous.

It’s unethical for doctors at one hospital to keep information that could save lives from doctors in another hospital. The same thing is true for software…

Related posts:

I stand here on the shore, both feet firmly placed onto the sand and watch how the tide is running out. While my feet sink deeper and deeper into the muddy ground I wonder where all these years have…

I have seen many a tavern of the East and of the West: Here the cup-bearer is missing, there the wine is insipid. Be it Western wisdom or Eastern philosophy, Both are idol-houses — and it is…

You can reach me in any of this social networks. I tend to be a Twitter guy!. “Contacts” is published by João Almeida.