I maintain that the problem is a) failure of the originator to specify the changeable areas and b) failure of the programmer to think of things that may need to be changed.
While this sort of up-front thinking won't ease changing a compiler to a data-base, it will greatly ease most revisions. The original code will reflect those thoughts in its partitioning, etc. If the end system needs a data-base, design such as a separate module. That is reusable in many reworks.
--
[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
When you're talking "cowboy" process, or "hero", or "just do it" process it doesn't need to have anything to do with the customer at all. A couple of years ago we were trying a line of Linux SBCs for an embedded app. The engineer who introduced them warned me, and he was right: if you ran into a software problem, you could probably find a solution on the supplier's FTP site; what you couldn't do was *recognize* the solution on the supplier's FTP site. The site was a catch-all of all kinds of things with no obvious provenance -- many with eerily similar names, many with no obvious reason for being there at all. I remember an ugly evening spent with something that, at first, seemed to be the latest kernel source tarball.
It really seemed that people were stuffing things in there with no thought to how a 3rd party, or maybe even a 2nd party was going to be able to use them.
Somebody with the supplier later tried to clean it all up by linking to the important files from the company web site. Better than nothing, though the way they chose to do it, a strange use of symlinks, it seems, broke any relationship between the URL that you requested and the name of the file that you wound up downloading. You could read the page and be unsure whether this was, or was not, software you had already installed.
Documentation counts. Audit trails count. Process counts.
Mel.
Ah, but don't underestimate the complexities of moving sheep from place to place ;-)
-- Pertti, a programmer and a newbie sheep herder
But certainly don't underestimate the cool things you can do with sheep moving from place to place:
-- Gemaakt met Opera's revolutionaire e-mailprogramma: http://www.opera.com/mail/
That's why we leave all those jobs to a more intelligent race - sheep dogs. :-)
--
[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
Well, they did have the advantage of discussing the topic rather than the format! ;-)
Mark Borgerson
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