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Old 21st December 2012
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by J65nko View Post
The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.
The article cited tends to minimize the biggest difference -- inhouse software is not written to be elegant unto itself; it is meant to be a custom tool which furthers the goals of business. What management really wants is for software to be written (& preferrably completed...) with minimal requirements determined or while requirements are being written, discussed, bantered about. If software could be written with no requirements in place, this would be the most ideal situation from the standpoint of management.

However, this is a fantasy. Some level of understanding has to be in place in order for software to be written. Management will try to minimize these impediments as much as possible, because it will make them look better to their management hierarchy. A lot of software can be written with billion dollar budgets & years of front time for development. The manager who will be promoted is the one who gets the same work done overnight with only one dollar in expenses.

Absolute quality in software is not the goal. Software only has to be good enough to answer the question posed, or only be better than what the competition offers.
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