Interlude - About Software Engineering

(More Test Estimation to come, but first: An Interlude)

By now many of us know the standard 'barbs' - for example, that when Winston Royce designed the waterfall model, he said it was "risky" and "invites failure".

Or that Tom DeMarco, author of the oft-quoted "Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation" has essentially recanted his claim that "You can't control what you can't measure."

(To be more accurate, DeMarco actually argues that the quote may hold. It just turns out that control isn't all that important on software projects these days.)

Then I saw this video by Glenn Vanderburg at the Lone Star Ruby Conference:



Once again someone has taken some of those ideas, deconstructed them, and re-packaged them in a way greater than the sum of their parts. In the video, Greg goes way back, explaining not only what Winston Royce wrote, but the how and why it could have been perverted in the "waterfall" "standards based" and "software engineering" approaches of the 1980's and 1990's -- and what we should do about it.

I think you'll enjoy it.

Next time: Still more test estimation to come.

We're getting there. Really.