Tuesday, January 13, 2004

If you ask people about software development, they’ll tell you that software development is like gardening, baseball, writing a novel, a jigsaw puzzle, the stock market, rock-climbing team, war, blacksmithing, a game of Kerplunk, farming, baking a cake, art, digging a hole, archery, or the oil in your car.

Actually, it’s none of these things. Software development occurs entirely in the design/development phase. You aren’t actually making the product until you burn the CDs. Coding is a process of creating, testing, and refining a design. The source code is the design for the product that you will create.

It took me quite awhile to realize this.

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