[SystemSafety] Collected stopgap measures

[Steve Tockey]

Derek,

³The lesson to learn here is that successful software does not need basic
requirements of a professional engineering design process.²

I agree that software can be delivered even if the process that built it
lacked many of the elements of a professional engineering design process.
Sure, there are thousands and thousands of data points supporting that. It
is Standard Operating Procedure across the industry. But that is not what
we should focus on.


"Where is the discussion of economics and the primary purpose of writing
software, i.e., maximize return on investment?"


Yes, again I agree fully. However, shouldn¹t we be asking this:

Could that same software have been delivered faster, cheaper, and with
higher quality if it had been built using a professional engineering
design process?

The real-world data I have says yes.



‹ steve



-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety <systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
on behalf of Derek M Jones <derek at knosof.co.uk>
Organization: Knowledge Software, Ltd
Date: Friday, November 16, 2018 at 5:46 AM
To: "systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de"
<systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Collected stopgap measures

Martyn,

> I think this discussion is missing the point.

It certainly is.

Where is the discussion of economics and the primary purpose of
writing software, i.e., maximize return on investment?

> To summarise: Paul Sherwood observed that most successful software
> lacked the basic requirements of a professional engineering design
> process, specifically documented requirements or documented design. He

The lesson to learn here is that successful software does not need
basic requirements of a professional engineering design process.

> also said that in his opinion this was not the right way to develop
> software, especially for safety functions. He further observed that some

We seem to be confounding general software and software for safety
functions.

General software has a short lifetime and it is not cost effective
to invest too much up front:
https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2017/04/20/average-maintenanced
evelopment-cost-ratio-is-less-than-one/

> I would like the discussion to focus on what we might be able to do to
> radically improve software engineering standards across industry, when

Reduce competition (so it becomes profitable to invest more in software,
because it has a longer lifetime) and start throwing people in jail when
software fails.

What other effective incentives are there?

-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com
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