Software Psychology

Software is Not Coding, It’s A Cooperative Game of Communication by Bruce Nielson

The Law of Lossy Requirements by Bruce Nielson

Lossy Compression

In computer science, compression is an indispensible tool. Anyone familiar with .zip files knows what I mean. Interestingly, there are two kids of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless compression is like .zip compression, you put a file of, say, 100kb in and the end result is a file of, say, 50k. But when you reverse the process, you get back your original 100kb file.

Lossless compression relies on the fact that in real life information contains patterns. Just imagine taking this post and finding the most common used words in it. Then replace the most common word with a the tag “<1>” and the next most common with “<2>”, etc. The end result would generally be a smaller file, yet by replacing “<x>” with the original words you could recover the original file in its entirety.

I used to wonder what possible use lossy compression could ever be. Why in the world would I ever want to save off a compressed version of my files if I couldn’t get them back to their original state ever again?

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Code is Design by Bruce Nielson

The Story So Far

Let’s return to the primary concern with Software. We’ve talked about how most software projects either fail altogether or run significantly over budget. Along with that thought, we considered the statistics that show that the development team itself plays little role in the success and failure of the project in comparison to users and sponsors. However, contrasting that we’ve looked at how software development is really developed in “thought units” more so then actual code.

These two facts seem on the surface to be at odds with each other. If software is really developed in “thought units” then why do users and sponsors have more control over the success and failure of the project then the developers?

Coding As Design

I will now explore this question further in a series of posts. But first, we need to look at the concepts of “software design” vs. “software coding”

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