Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

two things made me realize I didn’t want to leave my technology behind. 1. I wanted to do, not direct others to do. 2. I wanted to be free to make my own decisions, not become a “manager in the middle” who often had to pass on the decisions of those above him.

In Al Davis’s wonderful book on software principles (1995), he says it very clearly in Principle 127: “Good management is more important than good technology.” Much as I hate to admit it, Al is right.

Bollinger responded, “More than anything else, I would want to know that the person who wrote the software was both highly intelligent, and possessed by an extremely rigorous, almost fanatical desire to make their program work the way it should. Everything else to me is secondary.

The most important factor in software work is not the tools and techniques used by the programmers, but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.

Bucher (1975), who said, “The prime factor in affecting the reliability of software is in the selection, motivation, and management of the personnel who design and maintain it,”

managers often get so enmeshed in all that commonsense, warmed-over advice that they lose sight of some very specific and, what ought to be very memorable and certainly vitally important, facts.

The software industry is in the same state of affairs that the pharmaceutical industry was in during the late nineteenth century. Sometimes it seems that we have more snake-oil salespeople and doomsayers than sensible folks practicing and preaching in our midst.

We in the software field, all of us technologists at heart, would prefer to invent new technologies to make our jobs easier. Even if we know, deep down inside, that the people issue is a more important one to work.