HW2: 500+ word response to No Silver Bullet, Kode Vicious, and Google Code Repo taken together - find common concerns in the articles and reflect upon them.
A common theme that I seemed to notice throughout No Silver Bullet, Kode Vicious, and Google Code Repo was how procrastination truly affects the individual and how it can grow to become a monster that is untamable. The documents seem to all have common concerns about general efficiency, data store, management, and problem solving. Below is my analysis of the documents previously mentioned.
A silver bullet is some simple magical solution that can solve all your complicated problems in one shot. (http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/silver%20bullet) The document states how, “there is inherently no silver bullet”.
Business people view software engineers as workhorses asking them to develop a product in X amount of days and not considering the true amount of time quality development takes. It is not only a tool to make a profit but also an art form that should be greater valued. In Kode Vicious, the author, George V. Neville-Neil, talks about how all problems should be approached with the scientific method. The scientific methods outcomes can be measured, which is what makes it so useful. You can only truly see the progress being made in any sort of project by comparing it to the value of its previous outcome. A hypothesis is a testable idea for solving the problem. The nice thing about a hypothesis is that it is either true or false, which works well with our Boolean programmer brains. I personally agree with this statement and wish I would remember to apply it more to my situations. I think that when the boss is asking their employees if the problem is fixed and how he knows, he should not be getting annoyed, but simply presenting her with the evidence so she has no question about its legitimacy. I think it was also valuable how the response mentioned keeping proven and disproved hypothesis. This is a step I feel that is often times left out. In, Google Code Repo By Rachel Potvin and Josh Levenberg they discussed a new approach to the concept of cherry picking. They described it as the Release branching model which is comprised of a trunk which has branches that go towards cherry picking or released branch. When a branch needs some altering they are first diverted to cherry picked branches and then merge to release branch. The way google has structured their code repo is something that has broadened my understanding of data storage.