1 Perspectives on Programming

Programming is…

• a science (Gries)

• an art (Knuth)

• a process (Humphries)
• like writing
  • Literate Programming (Knuth)
  • “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” (Brooks)
• like farming (Brooks, Hunt, Thomas)
  • like oyster farming
• like hunting werewolves (Brooks)
• like construction (McConnell)

2 Software Construction

The collection of activities that actually produce the working software.

• Coding and debugging at the center, plus supporting activities

• Excludes management, reqts. analysis, architectural design, UI design, acceptance testing, maintenance

• “the only activity that’s guaranteed to be done” (McConnell)
• the fun part!

Importance of Construction

• central activity (30-80% of total project effort)

• the “climax” of the development project:

  • everything else builds up to or eases down from construction
• The product (source code) is often the only accurate and up-to-date description of the system.
  • a favorite tenet of agile advocates

Questions

• How would this picture change for incremental / agile projects?

• What other changes have been made in last 10-15 years?

3 Key Construction Decisions

Some of the key decisions to be made before entering or during the early part of software construction:

3.1 Choice of Programming Language

What are the factors that would influence this?

• Expressiveness & Readability

  • “You save time when you don’t need to have a rewards ceremony every time a C statement does what it’s supposed to.”

• Familiarity
  • Programmers with 3 or more yrs. experience are 30% more effective than similar programmers working in a new language (Boehm, COCOMO)
• Platform & Tool support
• Library support

3.2 Programming Conventions

• Naming conventions
• Documentation conventions
• Modularity conventions
• Style guides

3.3 Construction Practices

• Coding
  • Up front versus incremental design (& reqts)
  • Architectural decisions (e.g., error handling)
• Teamwork
  • Team organization & roles
  • Integration process
• Quality Assurance
  • Testing standards and procedures
  • Inspections, Pair programming
    • Who has eyes on the code?
• Tools
  • Version control
  • Language & compiler choices
    • language versions & features
  • Frameworks
  • Configuration control
  • Integration tools

4 Looking Ahead

Through the rest of the semester we will look at

• Unit testing
• Build managers
• Version control
• Documentation tools
• Configuration managers
• System & regression test
• Code analysis tools

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