After the Gold Rush : Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering

Thanks to Jason Bennett for sending us a review of author Steve McConnell's lastest book After the Gold Rush. The book looks at the maturation of software development and what that means for us. Click below to read more. After the Gold Rush : Creating a True Profession of Software En author Steve McConnell pages 182 publisher Microsoft Press, 11/1999 rating 9/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0735608776 summary One impression of the maturation of software development

Background

I've always been amazed that certain fields of endeavor exist in which many people prefer rank amateurs to trained professionals. I don't know many people who would choose their neighbor's kid to perform surgery, or hire a journalist to build a bridge, yet every day software development shops hire people whose only training is that they have read some book on Visual Basic or C++ or Perl, and put them to work on major projects. In fact, in the software development business, experience can sometimes be a liability (see the debate over immigrant programmers and age discrimination). Don't worry, you won't have to apply for a license to write code, and no one is going to confiscate your keyboard if you design your own web page. Accountability, however, is another story....

What's the book about? Steve McConnell, author of Code Complete , Software Project Survival Guide , and many other excellent books on software engineering, has returned. For those of you who might not be familiar with him, Steve is President and Chief Software Engineer of Construx Software, a software consulting firm based outside of Seattle. He's also the Editor in Chief of IEEE Software, and is generally regarded as one of today's best authorities on how to do software the right way. In After the Gold Rush, Steve gives his view of where the software world should go from here.

Currently, people don't know how to build software. Or, to be more accurate, there are good techniques out there to build software, but most people ignore them for one or more reasons, none of which hold up under close scrutiny. In addition, software development depends on death-march-style schedules, whereby programmers wreck themselves trying to get the software out the door at the appointed time. One major problem is that the developers are not trained in writing software in the first place. They are either trained in computer science, or some totally unrelated field. To compound this problem, very few if any continue their education in such areas as professional reading or training.

There is hope, however! Now that software development is moving out of its "gold rush" period, where the firstest gets the mostest, we can begin to develop software engineering as a profession. This means training people in engineering instead of science, and defining what it means to be a software engineer. Unfortunately, we have a lot of work to do both on the level of education, and in the mindset of today's software developers.

The third and final part of ATGR dwells on the future, especially as it relates to what these developments will mean for software developers of today. I'll spare you some of the suspense, and tell you that you won't be forced to be certified. Does anyone really care if your desktop clock was written by a true engineer? On the other hand, you bet I care that my air traffic control software and my medical scanning software and my car's control software were signed off on by someone who knows what he's doing. Licensing will be in software engineering what it is in other engineering fields: required in some areas, meaningless in others. In the end, however, software will be better for it.

What's Good?

Personally, I greatly enjoyed this book, mostly because it says what I've felt for some time now. The development of true software engineering will be akin to the development of true medicine. We will be able to move ourselves from the Age of Leeches to a more enlightened age where quality and process matter. McConnell makes a compelling case for why events will transpire in this way, and what the benefits are. No one thinks that these developments will be some sort of panacea or silver bullet, but when true software engineers, complete with a code of ethics and a professional organization, are responsible for developing software, there will exist an undercurrent of ownership and responsibility that currently does not exist.

What's Bad?

There's not much I didn't like about this book. If you develop software for a living, read this book. It describes where your industry is going in the next twenty years.

So What's In It For Me?

Maybe a lot, maybe nothing. If you develop your software purely as a hobby, these events won't directly effect you much. You will never need a license just to write code. If, however, you belong to that cadre of programmers that likes to think of themselves as "software engineers," or who would like to think of themselves as such, read this. You won't be forced to take a test tomorrow, but software development will never be the same.

Pick this up book up at ThinkGeek.

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  1. The Tar Pit
     1. Software Dinosaurs
     2. Fool's Gold
     3. Orphans Preferred
     4. Software Engineering Is Not Computer Science
  2. Prospecting
     1. After the Gold Rush
     2. Engineering a Profession
     3. Ptolemaic Reasoning
     4. Body of Knowledge
     5. Novum Organum
  3. Through the Pillars
     1. Stinking Badges
     2. Architects and Carpenters
     3. Hard Knocks
     4. The Professional's Code
     5. Alchemy
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index