02 November 2007

Software Engineering: Standards (Just the Quotes)

"Autonomation [..] performs a dual role. It eliminates overproduction, an important waste in manufacturing, and prevents the production of defective products. To accomplish this, standard work procedures, corresponding to each player's ability, must be adhered to at all times." (Taiichi Ohno, "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production", 1978)

"Recognition of the idea that a programming language should have a precise mathematical meaning or semantics dates from the early 1960s. The mathematics provides a secure, unambiguous, precise and stable specification of the language to serve as an agreed interface between its users and its implementors. Furthermore, it gives the only reliable grounds for a claim that different implementations are implementations of the same language. So mathematical semantics are as essential to the objective of language standardisation as measurement and counting are to the standardisation of nuts and bolts." (C Anthony R Hoare, "Communicating Sequential Processes", 1985)

"The [software] builders’​​​​​​ view of quality, on the other hand, is very different. Since their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own. The minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they have achieved in the past. This is invariably a higher standard than what the market requires and is willing to pay for." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)

"A pattern is a fully realized form original, or model accepted or proposed for imitation. With patterns, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor." (Peter Coad, "Object-oriented patterns", 1992)

"The difference between standards and guidelines is that a standard specifies how the interface should appear to the user, whereas a set of guidelines provides advice about the usability characteristics of the interface." (Jakob Nielsen, "Usability Engineering", 1993)

"With each pattern, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor." (Peter Coad, "Object-oriented patterns", 1992)

"Standards make it easier to reuse ideas and components, recruit people with relevant experience, encapsulate good ideas, and wire components together. However, the process of creating standards can sometimes take too long for industry to wait, and some standards lose touch with the real needs of the adopters they are intended to serve." (Robert C Martin, "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship", 2008)

"Coding standards are rules, sometimes relatively arbitrary, that define the coding styles and conventions that are considered acceptable within a team or organization. In many cases, agreeing on a set of standards, and applying them, is more important than the standards themselves." (John F Smart, "Jenkins: The Definitive Guide", 2011)

"In many applications, integration or functional tests are used by default as the standard way to test almost all aspects of the system. However integration and functional tests are not the best way to detect and identify bugs. Because of the large number of components involved in a typical end-to-end test, it can be very hard to know where something has gone wrong. In addition, with so many moving parts, it is extremely difficult, if not completely unfeasible, to cover all of the possible paths through the application." (John F Smart, "Jenkins: The Definitive Guide", 2011)

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