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    Posté par (site web personnel) . En réponse à la dépêche Documentation française sur MDA. Évalué à -1.

    Extrait d'une fiche de lecture sur le mois homme mythique (F. Brooks)
    Il commençait par parler de la fascination pour les méthodes qui tuent il avait appelé ça le syndrome de la balle en argent, et ensuite il dit que les méthodes ont finalement moins d'impact sur l'amélioration des logiciels (preuve à l'appui) que les les bons programmeurs, ceux qui ont pas besoin de charabia incompréhensible pour expliquer leur vision:


    There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
    Software engineering is made of two parts: dealing with the essence and dealing with the accidents.
    We can define the essential part of the job as the design, the specification, the testing of the conceptual construct. Fred Brooks believe this part is being the hardest, and that every gain on this domain have a great impact on the accidental one. The accidental part consists of mapping the concept to reality through all kind of artificial barriers that are not inherent to the conception. These barriers can be hardware constraints, inadequate programming language, inadequate structure ....

    Werewolves are terrifying creatures that once familiar, become terrifying horrors. Software projects can slip to horror through usually innocent forms such as missed schedule and then blow your budget or become a flawed product. But, as we look at the technique available (in 1975) in both programming and management, we cannot figure a technique that will improve simplicity, reliability, or productivity in an order of magnitude.

    Et sa solution est

    Mythical Men : Peolpeware
    The central theme of this book is software are made by men, and the raw material for success is creativity. Therefore the quality of people their organisation and management structure is much more important than the tools or methods they are using. Brooks enforces its intuition with Boehm's study : the quality of a team is the largest factor for success in software development.
    Then, management's attributions is not to make people work, but to give them the mean to work.

    The Human factor: great designers
    Improving softwares implies de facto improving the development, and this can be done only through people. Good designs can be obtain by following good practices. Good practices can be taught, and spread through literature, and curses ...
    Nevertheless, Fred Brooks do not believe in a strong breakthrough by doing this, he rather thinks that designing is a creative process , and that the only way to have good design is to have great designers. He then point out that great designs usually from few minds considering UNIX, APL, PASCAL, in contrast with COBOL, PL/I and MS-DOS.
    As a consequence organisations should grow great designers. To do so some steps are obvious :
    • identify them early, the best might not be the most experienced

    • mentor their careers

    • grow their competence and responsibility through a career plan

    • provide a stimulating environment that helps designers to interact with each others