Making Good Software

Are we in front of the next era for software development? Are you ready? or are you going to become a dinosaur developer?

I remember that around 10 years ago object oriented started becoming the main stream in software development, even though C++ was already been used, it was not up to the consolidation of Java that companies started moving to OOP massively, that at least, was the experience I had in Spain where I was working back them (I suppose this would happen a few years before in US, but I would appreciate very much the feedback from any reader to confirm it), back in those days, companies expended huge amounts of money training people that was previously working with some other not object oriented languages as C, Pascal, Cobol… there was a lot of excitement, frustration, success stories and also complete catastrophes… it was a revolution as some of you will probably remember, well, in my opinion, something similar is happening again.

199x – The source code revolution (The OOP revolution)

As I said above, UML, Java, OOP paradigm… were the buzz words back in the 90s, people believed again that they had found the silver bullet for development, if you didn’t know how to do a UML class diagram or Java, you were not on the cool side of programming.

Lots of programmers had to learn a new software development paradigm, which was not easy, the most veteran developers were the most troubled, some couldn’t adapt and end up doing “sequential” programming embedded in objects, (which of course defeats the whole purpose of OOP), some of them eventually change their mindset and eventually started thinking in objects, and for some others, quite a big group actually, that mindset change was impossible, and they end up maintaining legacy code, (in the worst case scenario you can still find some dinosaur programmers still doing this “sequential” programming nowadays).

200x – The process revolution (Agile/lean…)

Now we are in the middle of the next revolution, this time not focused on the source code, but in the processes, the buzz words are: agile, lean, TDD… As with the previous revolution there is probably going to be a big readjustment, and the big question is: “Are we prepared for it?” As in the 90’s, there are going to be a lot of professionals which won’t be able to keep up with all the changes, so the big question is: Are we going to be one of those future dinosaurs developers? My own recommendations are:

• Try to be as informed as possible. Read, ask, do some training, but above all make sure you understand, it is almost as dangerous to learn about something without understanding it than no knowing it at all (think on all the programmers that still think that TDD is all about testing).
• Be proactive. Show initiative; show that you actually do understand the new processes.
• Don’t be religious. As with the OOP source code revolution, there are some people that believe that these changes are the silver bullet for software development, be aware that there is no such thing, so be wise and don’t accept something just because is new, first put that in your project context and analyze if it will work for you.

Bonus: 201? – The source code revolution II? (Functional programming?)

Well, if what I called the “Process revolution” is a revolution which in my opinion is happening right now, the “Source code revolution II” is something which I’m guessing will happen just after the “Process revolution” just as soon as people start to understand that is not the silver bullet, so my guess is that the focus will go back to the source code and we will probably see the commercial massive adoption of new programming paradigms as Functional Programming… What do you think? Will this become the next revolution? Is the Process revolution the current revolution?