A coworker pointed me to the following video: Quality Software Development by Yahoo Architect Douglas Crockford (181 MB). The presentation from from the Yahoo 2007 FrontEnd Engineering Summit (March 7-8, 2007).

Below are my notes of the slide titles.

  • The Software Crisis
  • Craft vs Engineering
  • Computer Science has not taught us how to manage software projects
  • Software Construction (Good and Bad Analogy)
  • Nature of Software
  • Programming is Difficult
  • Lack of Metrics
  • Lines of Code – not good
  • Programmers are optimists
  • Programmers do not understand how they spend their time
  • Actual time typing is pretty small
  • Skeptical of anything that requires more keystrokes
  • Programming is a social activity
  • Cost of Innovation
  • Legacy
  • Leaps (of productivity? software capability?)
  • Object Oriented Programming (History)
  • Failed Leaps
  • Software does not have enough self awareness to be afraid of bugs
  • Bugs
  • Snake Oil / Silver Bullets
  • Mythical Man Month (1975)
  • Literate Programming (Knuth)
  • Significant difference in individual ability
  • Surgical Team (Harlan Mills)
  • Incrementalism
  • Beta (Perpetually Unfinished)
  • Application triad (skill, technology, requirements)
  • Feature Cost
  • Code Value
  • Code Quality (Micro and Macro View)
  • Simplest thing to enhance value of codebase – make more readable
  • Yahoo Javascript coding convention
  • Programs are a medium of intentional communications
  • Good architecture – necessary structure to keep from collapsing
  • How do we change a correct program into another correct program?
  • Cruft – “Software Scar Tissue”
  • Causes of Cruft
  • Bloat – “Software Cancer”
  • Insecurity
  • Cruft accumulates -> complexity groups -> progress slows
  • Refactoring
  • Sometimes it is best to start over
  • The pain of the crash
  • The illusion of completion
  • An experienced team can cross that ground again very quickly
  • Conclusion