Semantic Werks

I just returned from the ICSM conference and associated workshops in Paris, France (very nice, thank you). I have many notes on talks I saw, but herewith a few impressions:

ICSM is about software and machine artifacts, not requirements. Requirements come from on high, and the impetus for maintenance tasks is generally assumed to be well understood. It seemed a little like solving the problem of getting suburbanites to a downtown office by improving the highway signage, or improving offramps, but ignoring urban rail as an option altogether.

A discussion at the workshop on evolvability spurred me to consider the ’smart-monkey syndrome’. My contention is that building software, while hard, is not the hardest problem. I think there is a lot of evidence for this, starting with Brooks’s law, which is all about the external effects on software development, specifically communication.

Along the same lines, Bruce Eckel posted a neat thought-experiment, asking, “If Microsoft, with all the money and smart people it has, can’t release cool applications more than once every few years, than who can?” Several responses disagree, suggesting Microsoft is actually quite innovative. However, one of the respondents posted an argument with which I wholeheartedly concur, namely that it is again the external factors — multi-national lawsuits, legacy support for code from the 80s, internal communication, device support, etc. — that is the real bottleneck. This, I think, supports my contention that the building of software — e.g., GMail — is the easy part. I am almost certain that Microsoft engineers have had many of the same ideas as Google, but external reasons prevented their realization, such as corporate strategy, marketing, etc. Much as I have shied from the business side of software as fuzzy and pseudo-scientific (meaning that many of the claims in the literature are wholly unsubstantiated by evidence), I am coming to realize that it may be the one aspect that matters the most - and certainly more than language choice.