Is 'Brogramming' Killing Requirements Engineering?

chicksdaddy writes "Veracode's blog has an interesting piece that looks at whether 'brogramming' — the testosterone- and booze-fueled coding culture depicted in movies like The Social Network — spells death for the 'engineering' part of 'software engineering.' From the post: 'The Social Network is a great movie. But, let's face it, the kind of "coding" you're doing when you're "wired in"... or drunk... isn't likely to be very careful or – need we say – secure. Whatever else it may have done, [brogramming's] focus on flashy, testosterone-fueled "competitive" coding divorces "writing software" – free form, creative, inspirational – from "software engineering," its older, more thoughtful and reliable cousin.' The article picks up on Leslie Lamport's recent piece in Wired: 'Why we should build software like we build houses' — also worth reading!"

Comments

Brogramming???

[Bigbutt]

Can we fucking kill this meme right now?

[John]

Re:Brogramming???

[Anne_Nonymous]

Judging from some of the roofers I've known, drunk would be exactly the way to "build software as we build houses".

Re:Brogramming???

[telekon]

I remember when we called this sort of thing "cowboy coding."

Now I feel so old, I'm imagining there were actual cowboys.

Re:Brogramming???

[AwesomeMcgee]

You forget the other part of the equation, the corporotocracies where they have BA staffs that don't write requirements either, I guess MBA's are above all that work mumbo jumbo and just hang out while telling the devs to do something useful without giving us any bloody specs at all ever. It's not just startups that are running without requirements, it's the entire industry anymore. I don't know why, this used to be a given expectation of a dev's job that they would get requirements, but I guess somebody at some point decided we could just generate wealth for our masters without the slightest bit of input at all.

I guess it doesn't help that enough of us are smart enough to actually do just that, but still, it's bloody annoying!

Re:Brogramming???

[TheSpoom]

From a software engineer who has never lived in Silicon Valley, the whole idea is ridiculous to me. No team I've ever worked with would even consider working while drunk.

Maybe teams in California work differently, who knows. Personally, I know that any code I write while intoxicated beyond a certain point is complete shit. If you think yours does not, you're lying to yourself.

Not even going to start on how accurate the movie is to real software engineering (hint: it's not).

Never seen one

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood's doing as good of a job portraying programmers as they have every other aspect of technology. I've never seen this 'brogrammer' in the wild. I don't doubt that there may be small, isolated pockets of them but it's not exactly the cancer that is killing the industry.

Depends on the product

[cs668]

If you was your time upfront and someone beats you to the market, who cares about the engineering!! If you capture the market for a new idea you can use a more formal process for v2 while your competitors missed out.

If you are building my pacemaker, then lets be formal from the start!!

Seems, dumb to make a one size fits all statement about hacking out some code vs. engineering.

Like houses??? WTF??

[n1ywb]

Anybody who thinks that software development should mirror home construction has obviously never built a house, lived in a brand new house and delt with the sorts of issues that arise, done any major renovations, or otherwise been exposed to the sort of shoddy cob jobs that permeate the industry. Here in Vermont you're always finding shit like balled up newspaper insulation in the walls, 100 year old knob and tube wiring, frozen pipes, banging pipes, lead pipes, lead paint, asbestos, vermiculite, front porches built from rotting wood, leaking roofs, freshly painted fronts but peeling backs, dry laid slate foundations, and other eye boggling crap, pretty much every house you look at. The architect might draw plans but belive me the construction crew will find a way to bungle them and will do whatever they damn well please to get the job done. I feel like somebody is stretching for an analogy. SOFTWARE IS NOT CONSTRUCTION! SOFTWARE IS NOT LIKE A HOUSE! FFS. Different types of projects require different levels of care. Blogs, social networks, and one off command line utilities do not kill people when they break.

Anyway as a software engineer I can tell you that I THINK in code. I draw diagrams sometimes, for the complex bits, as necessary. But if I code up a POC and it sucks, it's cheap to tear it down and start again. Not so much when you are building a house, get it right the first time or you will hate life. So it's a dumb analogy.

Re:Like houses??? WTF??

[sandytaru]

Actually, your description of that new house is exactly like some code I've seen...

Re:Why should we care?

[idontgno]

Exactly. Look at the market fail-crater that is Facebook.

Oh, wait, that didn't happen. Success and failure have exactly nothing to do with quality of the software product. "Good enough for the suckers" is the order of the day and the practitioners of this approach rake in billions of dollars a year.

So, yeah. I'm not sure what definition of "fail" you're using, but clearly it has nothing to do with revenues, market, or social impact.