Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

["Trevor Perry" <tperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that programming itself will change inherently. With more 
plug-n-play software (sure, read SOA), there will be less coding and more 
orchestration and choreography. And while we might take the 
have-a-go/fail/have-another-go/fail/have... approach to orchestration and 
choreography, I do think that more disciplined approaches are needed if we 
are actually using a business approach to IT.

Maybe my standards ARE too high.

Oh well, back to SEU for me!


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <AGlauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 2:46 PM
Subject: Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch


> Trevor Perry wrote on 15/12/2006 03:16:28 PM:
>
> > First, I did not imply anything - let alone that an IDE can prevent
> logic
> > errors.
>
> Well, that seems to be how at least a few of us read your statement.
>
>
> >  Which leads me to believe that your approach is simply
> > undisciplined.
>
> I don't understand how this follows, although I do agree that many shops
> (including mine) do not follow disciplined software development models.
>
>
> > What happened to code walkthroughs?
> > Did they go out of fashion because we got a faster server?
>
> I've only been at this for a couple of years, so I guess I got to the game
> after they went out of style.  I think that walkthroughs would be a great
> idea.  The problem is that many shops have so many projects piling up that
> it's difficult to make the case for a more methodical approach, because on
> the surface it appears that such an approach would take more time per
> program.
>
>
> > I just think that we have it easy - the System i works well serving
> multiple
> > tasks - production AND development. And we got lazy in our coding
> efforts. I
> > used to teach a class called "Programming for performance and
> > maintainability". What I found was code that was hard to read by the
> > programmer who WROTE it - and maintainability was improved by several
> > things. One was better documentation (IN THE code) - WDSc helps with
> this,
> > because you can see it clearly and can see MORE of it. Another was
> spending
> > time understanding the code before diving in and
> edit/compile/edit/compile -
> > with the ability to see more of the code, more source members, and tools
>
> > like verify, WDSc helps us be better programmers.
>
> I love WDSc too, but as I'm sure you are well aware - "there is no magic
> bullet".  Software systems tend to be complex, and I while I agree that
> more disciplined coding and software lifecycle approaches can lower the
> rate of bugs in new code, I still think that the "compile, test, fix"
> cycle will be with us forever.