[lug] software engineering

[bgiles at coyotesong.com]

> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 05:32:43PM -0700, Bear Giles wrote:
>> The levels where it starts getting difficult?... they're
>> management, not engineering. Don't get me wrong, it's
>> usually still people on the engineering side of the house,
>> but when you're trying to make sure 14 teams are all
>> working on the same problem that's a management issue, not
>> something you solve with your grandfather's slide rule.
>
> The concept you're striving for here is Systems Engineering,
> a field newer than even software engineering.  At least as
> an official engineering discipline, people have *done* it
> for quite some time with varying degrees of success.

It's still a management issue to get the shareholders to buy into this
need and to keep everyone in sync.  Otherwise you get individual teams -
and their sys analysts - doing their own thing anyway since they're sure
they understand the project better than those other guys who only stop by
occasionally.

The problem, of course, is that we all have ample war stories about
clueless management that really didn't understand the problems and were
unwilling to listen to the people who did.  Doing what they asked would
either be impossible or would not solve the larger problem (as we
understood it).

We're harder to manage (as a whole) for a good reason, and management has
its own war stories about incompetent staff who don't know they're
incompetent.(*)

(*) and competent staff who are just having a bad day, or have been asked
to work outside of their area of expertise.  "You do java webapps?  Then
we need to pull you off your project so you can write the oracle
user-defined type that we need for accounting..."