day 84

digital darwinism 6: american swiss cheese

Yesterday we examined the Swiss Army Knife as a model of robust design architecture. Now, compare the stability of a Swiss Army Knife design with the sloppiness of the design of most software products. According to most software engineering textbooks, product development is an orderly process that progresses from requirements capture, preliminary design, detailed design, development, and testing -- all carefully carried out per the SEI CMM. When completely mastered, software engineering is like churning out Swiss Army knives. Everything is nice and tidy, predictable, scalable, and controllable. Central to the software engineering myth is the idea of a software architecture, e.g., a collection of clean interfaces and rules for using them. In the business, these interfaces manifest themselves as APIs (Application Programming Interfaces - pronounced "apes"). Every good software product starts with a good solid architecture. Every good programmer knows his or her APIs. This model could not be further from reality. In truth, most software products are designed on the back of envelopes that are lost or thrown away, the designers leave the company half-way through the project, or the competition upsets best-laid plans, causing product re-vectoring in midstream. And this happens on every day of the product development cycle. As a consequence, few products have what might be called an architecture. APIs are a moving target. The concept of an architecture is a fantasy.

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