CMM only specifies that there must be a requirements PROCESS that is followed; it doesn't require that this process work completely or faultlessly (or at all!).
It is virtually impossible to have a complete set of requirements and that any software process or methodology that assumes this is doomed to failure. The reasons that a complete set of requirements is impossible are many and varied and range from the fact that not every physical process can be completely modeled to the complexities of the environments in which products get used to the nature of the software business itself. If you're selling shrink-wrapped software on the open market, the correctness of your requirements may depend mostly on how good your market surveys were. If you do bespoke software, the quality of the requirements depends largely on how well the stake holders at your customer agree on what their needs are and what their own internal process is. The product plans and deliver schedules of other vendors can have a significant impact on what requirements must be met. I don't think that I'm in an unusual situation at all. In fact, it is the same situation faced by Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, or, for that matter, any software vendor who does not have complete, 100% control over the environment in which the software is used. (Is that even possible?) I don't claim that readability doesn't matter at all. Certainly, if you could perform the miracle of holding everything else constant, more readible programs would be easier to maintain. But I could equally well make the same statement for the quality of screen or LCD panel that developers used. (I'm somewhat surprised that no one in the discussion has raised the screen resolution issue.) It's just that Something that improved the capture of requirements by 0.5% is more likely to have a significant impact on the outcome of most software projects than improving the readability of code by 300%. Ruven Brooks -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lionel Draghi Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 2:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: Effect of letter casing on readability - New th read: relevance Thank you Ruven for your answers. If I understand well, you are CMM "4 or 5", but still delivering software with missing requirements? I can't explain this. As this is off-topic, i will stop here, and just conclude that you are in an unusual situation. So let's speak of a more usual situation: - either you are using some formal method and full code automatic generation (very seldom), - or coding is still mostly a human activity. In this later case, believe my experience, readability really matter. Readability is not easy to measure, so it is for readability impact on cost, but no experienced programmers will tell you that it's free. -- Lionel Draghi http://swpat.ffii.org/index.fr.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
