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Guest View: A discontinuous jump


By Charles W. Krueger
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March 15, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 4)
For an engineer, creating a dishwasher is more fun than washing dishes. Creating a car to take you places is more exciting than walking or running. Creating a factory to assemble cars is an even more interesting challenge than assembling cars.

The drive to create new and improved tools is an innate part of the human condition, hard-coded into our DNA. We are never quite happy with the current state of affairs and are always looking for ways to create new tools that minimize our labors and maximize our wellbeing, relaxation and recreation.

The historical timeline for our tool capabilities progresses through continuous and incremental improvements, with an occasional discontinuous jump. That term comes from calculus where, for our tool example, a smooth increasing graph reaches a point of discontinuity, makes a vertical stair-step jump, and then continues again as a smooth increasing graph. Discontinuous jumps in the context of tools arise from pivotal discoveries that lead to paradigm shifts.

Archeological indicators of discontinuous jumps in tools can be seen in the concentric fortifications around ancient cities. Smaller inner walls are circumscribed by taller and thicker walls, then encircled by huge earthen embankments and trenches. Each concentric layer demarcates a point in time where there was a discontinuous jump in the tools of war that rendered the previous fortifications obsolete.

Most software engineers—at least those not yet of retirement age—have never experienced a discontinuous jump in our tools and methods. Good news: That situation is at long last about to change.

The software engineering field has exhibited a rather monotonous timeline of continuous and incremental improvements in our tools and methods, with only one notable discontinuous jump in our 60-plus-year history. That event occurred over 50 years ago, when high-level languages and compilers supplanted low-level binary and assembly language programming to reduce the program statement count by approximately a factor of 20, and software delivery time and effort by approximately a factor of 5.

Of course, this rather mundane reality hasn’t dampened the spirits of our marketing teams. They are still having their fun with claims of order-of-magnitude improvements. But if you look beyond the anecdotal evidence and individual case studies, the software field has not experienced an across-the-board discontinuous jump since the advent of Fortran and COBOL compilers.


Related Search Term(s): software development

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