On December 15, Jim Davis wrote:
> IMHO: All software development should be performed as such:
>
> 1) Requirements - what should it do, and not do. Spin this till
> everybody
> signs off.
> 2) Prelim design - Ok, a rough outline of the design, data structures
> and control/data flow defined here.
> 3) Detailed design - Define all the modules and their function, break it
> down.
> 4) Test plan - integrate testing into detailed design, make it unit
> testable.
> a unit is somthing that has input and output and side effects, like a
> function.
> 5) Finally, coding - build modules in parallel with test code.
> 6) Unit testing - verify that modules comply with detailed design.
> 7) Integration testing - hook it all together, make sure it works, apply
> test plan developed in step 4 for fully integrated aplication.
>
> Do 1-3 until marketing decides what they want,4-7 until you find no
> errors.
>
> For safety critical, you should /have to perform statement and decision
> coverage in
> step 6 and 7 and the detailed design should have a one-to-one
> corespondence
> with the detailed design document.
Hmm, that procedure "reads" nice, but it sounds like more meetings
than actual work. But then I've been a software developer for about
twelve years, and nobody that I've worked with can figure out how I
can blow off all the meetings and not get fired...it's because I end
up writing all the code that the rest of the developers are talking
about in their meetings, WHILE they're in their meetings, and by the
time they're doing screwing around, the code is running.
Procedures are nice, but they can be taken too far. Goal-orientation
is better.
(While I'll freely admit that this approach simply doesn't work for
multi-million line applications, I should state that I generally work
on applications of less than one million lines, but generally more
than 100,000. I further state that my methods should probably NOT be
used in life-critical applications...more than two eyes need to look
at that stuff, no matter what.)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf
Received on Sat Dec 15 2001 - 13:25:37 GMT