Article Discussion: Is Configuration Really Easier Than Programming?

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Dear Dr. White,

Thanks for the very nice and thought provoking article.

All complexity came from the moment of inception of "reuse concept" in software engineering (late 80s and early 90s).

Fact of the matter is, most engineering disciplines are based on the reuse concept from components to formulas to ideas.

Despite several years of trying to bring reuse to practice, software engineers have found out that reuse in software is not the same as in other areas, which software is very hard to reuse.

Unfortunately, software engineers are not trained like other conventional engineers—to make optimum trade-off decisions (trade off between design and requirement).

A software engineer is more of a programmer than an engineer. In fact, except for modern software engineering courses,

software engineering students have been typically trained for individual work where they are asked to create their own programs from scratch. This would be tantamount to ask aeronautical engineering students to create airfoils in order to be able to design wings, or electronics engineering students to create integrated chips in order to design computers.

The irony is, by making software elements more complex it becomes less attractive to create them and more attractive to reuse them.

The bottom line is, if we want to achieve maturity in software engineering we must start thinking as engineers and stop thinking as craftsmen. A craftsman creates what you specify exactly.



Thanks,
iahmed

Yes ..
I am agrre with iahmed that we should work like real engineers.
in learning process it is good to know that how wheel are makes.
But after that we should practice and incourage to use them.

it will also boost the open source community.


zareef ahmed saifi

I totally agree with iahmed.

NILESH KURHADE
Accu-Swift

Thank you for your comments on my article.

As you will have noticed, the article was deliberately designed to be provocative. Indeed it is because I am an advocate of software reuse that I am concerned about how difficult it can sometimes be to configure and reuse existing components and containers.

iahmed makes some good points about the nature of software, reuse, and training. I would, however, like to make a further general point about the brittleness of software.

If you are building a bridge, a gross error in design can be catastrophic, but a small error may not be. And the minor imperfections in the building materials that you use probably don't matter too much either. You will have allowed a certain tolerance level for imperfections anyway, but without knowing or predicting what those imperfections might be.

Software is generally not like that. A gross error in design can be catastrophic, but a small error is almost as likely to be catastrophic too. And you can't write software to a specification and allow a 10% margin of error. All errors and imperfections have to be foreseen and built in to the specification. Otherwise the system will probably just fail and stop functioning.

For example, if you end up with a dead fly in your concrete mix, your bridge will still hold. However, a software system might fail because the designers didn't say how to deal with dead flies.

So I think that in this respect software is more demanding than some other disciplines. Could this be what makes software reuse hard?

Comments?

Simon

Thanks Iahmed and Simon! I agree with you both

However, I tend to think more like Simon since I am finishing a medical software program now, and every little bug has to be dealt with. So, with software, the bath water has to be perfect for the baby. Otherwise, you have to "throw out the baby the with bath water."

Daniel
MTbot Medical Software

Just want to correct some sentences, don't find edit button, so doing a re-post.

I am agree with iahmed that we should work like real engineers.
in learning process it is good to know how wheel were made.
But after that we should practice and try to use them.

it will also boost the open source community.


zareef ahmed saifi