Software engineering is still too much of a black art.
Just take any software engineering course at your local University and you will see why. There are so many design methods, none of which solve the problem of producing "good" software. Nobody seems to know how to produce a good product. We know certain truths about design such as adding more programmers to a late project makes it more late, but most things are still a mystery.
There are many reasons for late/bad software, I have heard users are to blame, managers and programmers themselves; that there are bad design principles, the specs were done poorly, etc. Even though we seem to know what we are doing wrong, why do we keep on repeating the same mistakes.
A professor of mine blames it on poorly educated designers, i.e. people coming out of business colleges with a VB degree who think they know how to code the perfect system. I would have to agree with him here, I think managers and programmers both need more training in software engineering. Just because you can write a sweet algorithm does not make you able to design a complete system.
All in all I still think software engineering is a black art, we know the problems but they are not solved. Sometimes we manage to produce a good system but this is rare.
It looks to me like another company just trying to make a quick dollar. I wonder how many more of these we are going to see trying to use the linux name to make a profit. There is just something about their web site that makes them seem kind of seedy, but then again I tend not to trust anyone who thinks running anything on a M$ platform is a good idea. Just looks like a bunch of marketers got together and decided with the recent good fortune of anything with the word linux in it on the stock market, that they would like a piece of the pie also. I don't like it and like I said, I can see a lot more similar companys/products in the future.
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Software engineering is still too much of a black art.
Just take any software engineering course at your local University and you will see why. There are so many design methods, none of which solve the problem of producing "good" software. Nobody seems to know how to produce a good product. We know certain truths about design such as adding more programmers to a late project makes it more late, but most things are still a mystery.
There are many reasons for late/bad software, I have heard users are to blame, managers and programmers themselves; that there are bad design principles, the specs were done poorly, etc. Even though we seem to know what we are doing wrong, why do we keep on repeating the same mistakes.
A professor of mine blames it on poorly educated designers, i.e. people coming out of business colleges with a VB degree who think they know how to code the perfect system. I would have to agree with him here, I think managers and programmers both need more training in software engineering. Just because you can write a sweet algorithm does not make you able to design a complete system.
All in all I still think software engineering is a black art, we know the problems but they are not solved. Sometimes we manage to produce a good system but this is rare.
Anyone else care to comment.
It looks to me like another company just trying to make a quick dollar. I wonder how many more of these we are going to see trying to use the linux name to make a profit. There is just something about their web site that makes them seem kind of seedy, but then again I tend not to trust anyone who thinks running anything on a M$ platform is a good idea. Just looks like a bunch of marketers got together and decided with the recent good fortune of anything with the word linux in it on the stock market, that they would like a piece of the pie also. I don't like it and like I said, I can see a lot more similar companys/products in the future.