Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

There are major differences between engineering systems and “just doing it.” The consequences are both obvious and predicted.

For at least 25 years, I have heard and seen in action the mantra of “good enough software.” Get a partial solution, ship it, improve it.

Great stuff. Except time has shown that the good enough software wasn’t. One of the larger problems with the good enough software is that it C O U L D do more than it was supposed to do.

Systems that are engineered, and this includes software systems, have requirements. The final system meets all the requirements A N D does nothing else.

Let’s consider FTP (file transfer protocol). Per Wikipedia, “The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer computer files between a client and server on a computer network.”

Great. Trouble is, there are other things you can do with FTP. Hence, people added all sorts of things to FTP to try to eliminate all the extra uses of it. Hmm, sounds like putting a band-aid on a broken arm, but please remember that I am old and have a funny perspective on some of these things.

This is a call for systems engineering—in this case, a call for software systems engineering. Banging out code has its advantages—showing what something can be quickly and inexpensively is one. It also has its disadvantages. We are living with billion$ in problems with the disadvantages with all our cyber security problems.

Bang out code for a demo. Engineer the software for a system. Please.