When Worlds Collide
By Bob Kaehms
Cross your arms, or cross your fingers. These are two extremes in software development. In the first, the problem is complex and mission critical. The methodology is formal and relies on requirements analysis and software life-cycle strategies. In the other extreme, software design is a crapshoot, one roll at a time: "Let's plug it in, and see if it works..." A constant feedback loop -- a dialogue with the medium and (hopefully) everyone involved. Although the entirety of the problem may be as complex in the second case as in the first, developers in this camp tend to work on a much smaller scale.
Those involved with the first extreme have been traditionally associated with central IS. The August 17 issue of Information Week included no fewer than ten crossed-armed information experts posed within the covers of the magazine. I counted the pictures. My total did not include the three or four with their hands on their hips, standing proud before their disk arrays and megaservers. Contrast this to the Perl conference held that week in San Jose, California, where over 1200 attendees had their hands waving in every conceivable direction.
Some would say that the Web was initially hacked together, is now broken, and that it's time for real programmers to come in and clean things up -- to make things more manageable, more scalable, more enterprise-ready. I'm not so sure. What will become more and more interesting in the future is the interface between these two strategies -- what's happening at the borders.
