August 2001
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
4h 9m
English
Content preview from Software Craftsmanship: The New ImperativeBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 3. Understanding Software Development
Is software development a mechanical task? I don't think so. Typing the code has never been the rate-limiting step, so physical analogies are not really appropriate. Although we are familiar with simple mechanical analogies, these analogies cause us to make mistakes. The really common one is the old mathematical school puzzle: If two people can dig a hole in four days, how long will it take four people?
The standard textbook answer to this puzzle is two days, but the simple mathematical world rarely corresponds to reality. Before we can say whether adding more people is a good idea, we need to understand the problem first.
What is the rate-limiting step in the process? (Yes, we can dig faster, but we ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.