Reading Response

In addition to answering the text book exercises, I will also be responding to many software engineering related articles. This week I read No Silver Bullet by Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Kode Vicious by George V. Neville-Neil, and Software Analytics: So What? by Thomas Zimmermann.

Here is my response to the articles:

No Silver Bullet by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

   In this article, software engineer Frederick P. Brooks goes over the many issues with software engineering. Brooks relates the complexes of creating software to the terrors of werewolves. The first aspect of this piece that surprised me was the year (1986) in which it was written. This shocked me because many of the problems that Brooks mentioned are still prevalent in today's software engineering world. Problems dealing with changeability and invisibility. He also states that there are many breakthroughs to combat these problems. Breakthroughs such as: Higher-level programming, time-sharing, and unified programming languages.

  I liked how blunt Brooks was about the issues within software engineering. However, I feel that his views about the solutions to the problems were a bit pessimistic. I feel the many breakthroughs with software engineering do in fact help. For example, higher-level programming deal with the issue of changeability by making it rather easy for programmers to change their code to meet the requirements of there clients.

Kode Vicious by George V. Neville-Neil

   Kode Vicious was my favorite article to read this week. I enjoyed the question and answer format. In this article, Neville-Neil answers his readers' questions about the notion of "cherry-picking", and ways to approach problems in software engineering scientifically.

  I really liked his answer to the second question. He gave the advice of using the scientific method to keep track of one's answer to a computer programming related issue. I liked this because, even though we are Computer Science majors we do not really approach CS like we would any other science and I think this is the wrong approach. I think alot of the headaches I have gotten as a result of a programming related issue could have been avoided if I used Neville's approach of systematically conquering the issue the way I would if I was conducting a chemistry-related experiment. I like the idea of writing "testable ideas" on note cards, then seeing if what you wrote worked or did not work. I will definitely try this approach in my future programming endeavors.

Software Analytics: So What? by Thomas Zimmermann

    I find the study of Software Analytics rather interesting, so I enjoyed reading this article. I think this subject will be a big field of study in the future and I am excited to see what software engineering brings to the world of data.