If you’re curious on one person’s viewpoint on software engineering as a
discipline (academic and professional) this is a very nice summary / rant
on it. One minor niggling point is that I think the author could spend
a little time fixing small grammatical mistakes. Since the mistakes
make a serious criticism like this look a little childish. But only on the
surface. Here’s a choice
snippet:
First, let’s touch on requirements gathering. No where in the book did Pressman
illustrate how most engineers actually get their requirements. He presented
some idealized scenarios, and correctly illustrated the benefits of use cases.
But in the real world, most requirements come from emails and rough wireframes.
Assuming that we can start by writing the specification is folly. What we
should be studying is how to turn a screen shot created in Photoshop in to a
real specification. Engineers need to learn how to annotate a screen shot with
input validation rules. They also need to error messages and edge cases. And
they need to do it with the understanding that their stakeholders don’t know or
care about such matters unless you bring it up to them first.
Read it yourself
Kudos to Joel’s Reddit page for this one
