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Srijan R. Shetty

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A few key takeaways and fun quotes from the insightful talk by Greg Wilson titled “What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True”:

  1. A programmer should be willing to burn the entire code base down and rebuild if the project reaches such a stage.
  2. Code reviews. Just do them.
  3. We know nothing about estimating the completion time of software projects.
  4. Conway’s Law: The code structure closely resembles the structure of the organization.
  5. As programmers, we can understand only small patches. (It’s because coding is a very complex task.)
  6. Engineering is the love-child of Science and Economics.
  7. Ask for citations, back everything with data.
  8. Increasing the problem complexity non linearly increases the solution complexity.
  9. Platform independent code provides platform independent performance.
  10. Coders produce the same number of lines of code disregarding the language they code in. As a consequence, we should be coding in a language higher up in the abstraction pyramid.
  11. We as a society have very low standards of proof.
  12. Most OOP metrics perform no better than a simple LOC measurement.
  13. Most of the time of developing a project lies in requirements and design phase.
  14. A possible reason while agile works is that we work on smaller parts of the project and hence this might lead to reduced time in requirements phase. Research Needed
  15. All progress in science isn’t forward, sometimes science has to take a step back, accept that it faltered and restart.

I would urge all of you to watch the talk:

Greg Wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True from CUSEC on Vimeo.