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The Economist Tackles Complexity in IT
yfnET writes "In recent weeks, The Economist has run a number of articles addressing the ever-increasing complexity of software systems. The magazine, with typical Economist wisdom, casts an eye towards past human endeavors for lessons on how today's IT industry can succeed in dealing with complexity. As part of last month's extensive survey of information technology (see Related Items sidebar), the magazine offers insight on the limits of real-world metaphors, the perils of managing a rat's nest of obsolescent systems, and the need for 'disappearing' technology. And hitting newsstands just today is an overview of development models for increasingly large and unwieldy software projects. Among other things, this article compares the open source model to Microsoft's efforts using a quasi-open license. It also describes the 'agile' programming movement and its potential to keep even the most gigantic of projects under control."
Translated from a a french newpaper: :-)
I'm not sur it will help...
"The historical operator, his Orange subsidiary company and Bouygues Telecom have all three known, in the last seven months, of the significant breakdowns, depriving their customers of telephone service for durations varying from a few hours at almost two days.The succession of these events clarifies the increasing complexity of the systems of telecommunications and the difficulties raised by the needs, news, of interconnection of many heteroclite networks". A minister in the french government as asked for a study about all these failures
le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant (M.Proust)
Was Arthur C. Clark, I believe. And the corollary to that is something like:
Ever heard of BugMeNot?
Two weeks ago, the Economist published a survey on outsourcing. Their "surveys" are extensive reports, consisting of about 14-16 printed pages, and 10-12 separate articles. It covers the topic from several different angles, and its helpful to see outsourcing in all its complexity, rather than the "Indians took my job, outsourcing is evil," perspective that dominates here.
I used to think like you do, but now I'm better. Work in a palimpset environment on a project that had 20 different coders on it, and you'll sing a different tune. The only examples of successful Smalltalk/Lisp projects I could find were 1-2 people working on the entire project for its entire lifetime. Um, that's not where the rest of us live.
Let's see... For those of us working in commercial development, how many of us are using Smalltalk and Lisp for new projects? Don't see many hands there. .Net, Java, PHP and Perl? Oooh, a lot of hands. I call "bollocks" on your claim.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
The premium article, naturally, is the worst of the bunch. It reads like the introduction to a Software Engineering textbook, padded with endless definitions of "regression testing", "open source", et al and contains almost no actual content. It may be interesting to the Economist's readers, but I doubt it is to very many people on Slashdot.
... which is a magazine, and not to be confused with the profession. In fact, I know of a few newspapers with that sort of name: The Economist and Sun, the Economist-Tribune.
Newspaper and magazine names are usually historical, and the words they contain have often changed meaning. For example, there is a local newspaper north of Toronto called "The Liberal". This newspaper has, for example, no ties to the Liberal Party, is not particularly philosophically Liberal (whatever that means), and is basically a local community newspaper that was named almost a century ago {more or less). What's in a name? Often, when it comes to media titles and tag-lines... nothing.
Just rememeber, "fair and balanced" is the tagline of Fox News.
i - This sig provided by
Most people can only keep/visualize/instantiate about 7 distinct objects in short term memory at any one time. You might want to stick to a max of 5 to cater the slightly below average. (Maybe someone might want to be a hero and try increase the population average to 10 items or something ;) ).
There are workarounds if you can easily get people to group a bunch of items as one object.
If people have to remember 7 or more important things during the learning period where short term memory is used then the thing is hard.
Given the amount of choices and options possible with software, it's going to be hard.
So the workaround is to split the learning phases to small absorbable chunks and give time between these phases for people to commit them to long term memory.
If you use common/defacto UI standards, many of the users would be familiar them and so the effective number of learning phases required drops.