The Problem With Software - Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code
Auteur : Barr Adam
An industry insider explains why there is so much bad software—and why academia doesn't teach programmers what industry wants them to know.
Why is software so prone to bugs? So vulnerable to viruses? Why are
software products so often delayed, or even canceled? Is software
development really hard, or are software developers just not that good
at it?
In The Problem with Software, Adam Barr examines the
proliferation of bad software, explains what causes it, and offers some
suggestions on how to improve the situation.
For one thing, Barr points out, academia doesn't teach programmers what they actually need to know to do their jobs: how to work in a team to create code that works reliably and can be maintained by somebody other than the original authors.
As the size and complexity of commercial software have grown, the gap
between academic computer science and industry has widened.
It's an
open secret that there is little engineering in software engineering,
which continues to rely not on codified scientific knowledge but on
intuition and experience.
Barr, who worked as a programmer for more than twenty years, describes
how the industry has evolved, from the era of mainframes and Fortran to
today's embrace of the cloud.
He explains bugs and why software has
so many of them, and why today's interconnected computers offer fertile
ground for viruses and worms.
The difference between good and bad software can be a single line of
code, and Barr includes code to illustrate the consequences of seemingly
inconsequential choices by programmers.
Looking to the future, Barr
writes that the best prospect for improving software engineering is the
move to the cloud.
When software is a service and not a product,
companies will have more incentive to make it good rather than “good
enough to ship."
Date de parution : 10-2018
Ouvrage de 320 p.
16x23.3 cm
Disponible chez l'éditeur (délai d'approvisionnement : 12 jours).
Prix indicatif 33,84 €
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