Rampant CodeCraft

In reference to:

McConnell: Software Engineering, Not Computer Science

The key here is that we are all at a loss in this field. As far as professional software development goes, no one is trained to do it via our education... not even the CS people, so we need to be constantly searching for professional practices that have been proven in the field to work and evaluate them for inclusion in our own work.

Now that doesn't mean once you've found something that works you are done and can coast until retirement. This industry is still quite young and as professionals in it, during these formative times, we must keep our ear to the ground and our eyes to the horizon because even the professional practices that work fine for *us* at the *moment* may not be the best possible as new methods and techniques are tried and evaluated every day across the globe.

We are professionals in an exciting field at an exciting, and notably unregulated, time. With that comes a lot of freedom and therefore a lot of responsibility that we must impose upon ourselves. Even now, clients can't tell the difference between good development and bad development until it is way too late so we cannot wait for the market to drive us to find better techniques, because it can't. *We* must drive ourselves. But in much the same way we have difficulty differentiating between high skilled and low skilled developers until the product falls, crashing down around us. And, truly, even then we have difficulty determining the fault because of the overwhelming number of variables involved in the project. Iterative methodologies are our *current* attempt to overcome this problem by pushing awareness that before only came at the end, up to the beginning. Giving us the chance to evaluate, adjust, correct and improve.

We must be constantly practicing and training ourselves in new methodologies for "the pursuit of unattainable perfection". 100 years from now, software developers will only be able to dream of the freedom-to-achieve that we have today in this field. Much like we view the wild west, I’d imagine.

We have a chance today to be really great and we must put forth the effort to reach and take it ourselves. For when the day comes that client’s can tell the difference between good and bad development, you do not want to be caught napping.