The "Real" Software Development Lifecycle... (Comments)

I think you’re right (and I live in the same world…

DavidJarvis - Dec 3, 2007

I think you’re right (and I live in the same world). One question is, how are companies like Microsoft making this sort of thing work? (I guess that presumes you accept that they are, as I do.) How do you “ride the nerd” to success and avoid the bloated remnant product? (Sort of like a lot of TV shows’s second season …)

David,

I guess what I’d say is, follow the practices of Bob Martin (unclebob) like this:

- Don’t let the code rot.

- Don’t put the low man on the totem pole in charge of your utterly critical subsystem. As Uncle Bob says, peeling off a ’tiger team’ to work on the shiny new thing while leaving the other programmers to deal with legacy codebases eventually bites you. In the ass.

What frustrates me is that people treat software as utterly disposable. If it sucks, so what? There’s 15 other widgets that do the same thing. I’ll use one of those.