Part2 of my follow up from Cusec2010, regards Douglas Crockford’s talk on “The Software Crisis”.
Short version for those headline skimmers: Crockford says that the Software industry is in a state of crisis, we need to fix it and we must fix it. I agree with all his recommendations and examples of flaws in our industry, but I argue that it isn’t necessarily a flaw but an inherent relationship between the software industry and the business world. Buggy software is often good enough, so lets just try to make it a bit better.
As a precursor to this talk, for the last few months I have been thinking about a similar (if not the same) problem: The software crisis. I had been talking with friends about something that bothered me about the software industry, imperfect code, imperfect process, the imperfect software industry. When Crockford stepped on stage and showed his first slide “The Software Crisis”, without him even continuing, I knew exactly what he meant. First off “Thank you Douglas for putting a name to an issue for me”, it was like remembering the lyrics to a song for a week without being able to remember who sings it. His talk was on aspects of the crisis, why they exist and how we can minimize and pave a brighter future. He had my attention….
I won’t go into the dirty details of the crisis itself (a quick google search should help you with that), but in short: we are getting lazy, we are producing bad production code, we are delivering late, we are testing too late, we are in major trouble. Why does this happen, and what can we do? Crockford opened by stating that creating software is the most complex task a human being can do. (Paraphrased, someone please msg me if you can remember the exact quote)
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