Re: Prototyping with Ada

[Mike Silva <snarflemike@yahoo.com>]

On May 20, 12:57 pm, "Jeffrey R. Carter"
<spam.jrcarter....@spam.acm.org> wrote:
> John McCabe wrote:
>
> > Thus you need to plan for the prototype to be thrown away, because
> > then you start again taking into account the lessons you learned from
> > the protoyping exercise.
>
> Brooks, 1975: Plan to throw one away. This is accepted practice in HW. The fact
> that so few developers and managers understand that this applies equally to SW
> is a big part of the reason so much SW is poor quality.

Right.  I learned this lesson the hard way (learned it more than once,
in fact).  Now I just plan for it and things go so much better.
Software is not infinitely malleable, and at some point you end up
inserting new errors for every error you are removing, or every
feature you are adding or changing.  And then, depending on your
company culture (or your personal standards), you either throw it away
or ship it.

Mike