Software Engineering Practices
September 30th, 2004 by Mark
So, I took this software engineering course in my senior year and never really realized how important that class was. I mean, I understood all of the things the teacher was telling me, and figured that they were all good ideas, but never thought of them as being absolutely necessary. That is, I figured you could do a reasonably good job without them. And, when I say “good job”, I don’t mean “create a good product” as much as I mean “create a good product that gets released in a predictable amount of time and doesn’t turn into an unmanageable beast.” I always figured, as I’m sure many programmers do at first, that things like spec documents were a luxury. Over the last few months I have come to learn otherwise. I really hope I still have the PDF of the documents my group and I created in that software engineering class. We did a damn good job and it would be great to use that document as an example and a kind of template in future projects. I’m sure we’ll be done with our current project soon, but it probably could have been done already if we had taken some more time and decided *exactly* what we were building before we started. And, no matter how much anyone tells me, I will always believe that is possible. Small changes are inevitable, but hitting a moving target with code is impossible.
