Search | Blog | Contact

sinking castles 1

Posted by David Chelimsky Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:54:11 GMT

I recently heard it suggested that large scale software projects should be built 3 times before releasing them:
  • once to prototype
  • once to prove out design
  • once with the intent of release.

Today I heard this quote from Monty Python:

“I built a castle in the swamp and it sunk. I built a second castle and it sunk too. I built a third castle and it burned down and then sunk. But the fourth castle, Ahhhh! That one stood.”

Maybe they were on to something…

Comments

Leave a response

  1. Avatar
    Esko Luontola 1 day later:

    IMHO, all software projects (with an user interface) should first be built as a paper prototype, which would then be tested to verify that all the users’ tasks can be accomplished with the program effectively. In other words, acceptance testing will be done before a single line of code is written.

    The process in TDD terminology:
    1. find goal-based use cases based on the user’s workflow (TDD: write unit tests)
    2. design a user interface with which the goal-based use cases can be completed (TDD: write code for unit tests)
    3. test that the use cases can be completed effectively (TDD: run unit tests)
    4. refactor the user interface to be more effective and clean (TDD: refactor the code to make it cleaner)
    5. return to any of the previous steps until the design is complete (TDD: iterative development)
    6. proceed to the implementation phase

    For more information: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/papers/GUIDe.html

Comments