Andree, >A few months ago I asked for some feedback on a project concerning software >authorship as design. I am just in the stage of putting together a very
What is software authorship and what counts as design? Source code can act as a specification and so 'design' and coding are often rolled into a single activity. If a company is developing an expensive product there will often be extensive documentation of a 'design'. It is often intended that the process of turning this into software should not involve any more design decisions, but in practice this ideal is rarely met. I don't think software authorship has anything to do with design. Software authorship is a discovery process. For me to design some software (e.g., your game example) I need to have had experience in writing similar game type programs. Without this experience I have little idea of the factors involved in producing a games program. By writing a program I get to discover the factors that need to be taken into account in producing such a program. The software market is very dynamic and developers are often moving to different projects and changing jobs. Many of them do not get to work on closely software projects (if the projects are that close company X might as well the software they have written to company Y). There is not sufficient repetition for software design to exist generally in the software development field.. At the last ACCU conference I gave a talk one of whose conclusions was that people were not adapted to continually thinking up new ideas and that developers should attempt to use a small set of constructs without having to consciously think about them http://www.accu.org/conference/presentations/ If anybody wants to argue the case that more design effort should go into the production of software, then please state: 1) the kind of software project you are talking about (eg, small or large scale, short or long time scale), 2) evidence of total economic benefit over the whole commercial lifecycle (that means taking into account projects that are cancelled). I will also, in due course be adding information about the analysis of >design protocols, and they do look very interesting >many thanks How do you plan to distinguish between design and discovery? derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/
