Re: software engineering and the notion of authorship

[ucaa2385@alpha1.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de (Peter Hermann)]

Fergus Henderson (fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU) wrote:
: In comp.lang.ada, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

: >To me this "ego-centered" style of programming is deadly.  It promotes a
: >situation where in a big project code is owned by individuals.

: I agree consistency is very important, as is maintainability.
: It is essential to make sure that the overall design is consistent.
: It is also essential that every part of the system is sufficiently
: clear, well-documented, and so forth that any programmer could make
: modifications to that part of the system, or take over responsibility
: for that part of the system, and consistency of style is important
: in facilitating this.  But I'm not convinced that recording
: authorship or assigning areas of responsibility is a bad idea.

Thank you for your contribution (you are saving my time  ;-).

Special topic "authorship": this has revealed to be one of the
most important properties of our systems. Each routine has
short "date/author/topic"-comments of creation and all subsequent updates.

[snip]
: And while team spirit is important, so is individual motivation, and
[snip]
: The important thing, IMHO, is finding the right balance.

agree

I also agree to most of the rules given in "Ada Quality and Style"
and it is a fun to read this document because it is 
spreading a feeling of deep SE-experience of its authors.
OTOH, "honny soit qui mal y pense", I think it is a bad idea
to impose EXTRA rules on human beings which do not have an important
justification.

E.g. it is of utmost importance to request variable names
which bear its exact meaning, it is not at all important 
to force a programer to_type_in_any_capital_letters
when he chooses to be lazy like me ;-)

That's why Ada is so great with its minimum
consens of absolute necessities at the man-machine-interface.

--
Peter Hermann  Tel:+49-711-685-3611 Fax:3758 ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
Pfaffenwaldring 27, 70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)