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THE TAR PIT. BY FRANKLYN OMORUAN. What Is Tar Pit ?. It describes software development as similar to a prehistoric tar pit, where great and powerful beasts thrashed violently but, ultimately, were unable to free themselves from death. Tar Pit.
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THE TAR PIT BY FRANKLYN OMORUAN
What Is Tar Pit ? • It describes software development as similar to a prehistoric tar pit, where great and powerful beasts thrashed violently but, ultimately, were unable to free themselves from death.
Tar Pit • Large scale programming have emerged with running system – few have met goals, schedule and budgets. • Large and small, massive or wiry, team after team has become entangled in the tar. • It should be noted that nothing caused the problem • Accumulating of simulation and interacting factors brought slower and slower motion. • Everyone is surprised by the stickiness of the problem and is hard to say the nature of the problem. • The problem has to be understood to enable us solve it.
We Have To Identify the following: • The craft of the system. • The joys • The woes.
Programs • A program is what we all have developed. It's simple piece of software that is useful to the programmer and/to some set of users who are directly involved in defining its requirements. • There are two ways a program can be converted into a more successful, but more costly, object • The two ways are Programming system and programming product
Programming product • Moving up the graph, we hit programming product. In theory, all commercial applications are programming products. • Programming product can be run, tested repaired and extended by anybody. • For it to become useable in many operating environments, for many sets of data a program must be written in a generalized fashion. • they cost three times as much to develop than simple fully-debugged programs yet they contain the same amount of functionality. This is why it's so hard to get sufficient budget and schedule to do a project right.
Programming Systems • Programming systems are programs intended to be reused as parts of larger systems. • In modern terms, they are libraries, frameworks, middleware, and other such components that are all the rage in software development . • Like programming products, programming systems are thoroughly tested, documented, and most importantly are useful outside of the context in which they were created. • Programming systems are relatively common in groups that execute a lot of similar projects. • The problems encountered are more technically challenging, and it is not strange because the programmer and his colleagues are the user.
Programming system products • It is useful to a wide range of users and can be effectively extended and/or embedded for the creation of larger systems. It has complete documentation and is extensively tested. • It costs nine times as much but it is truly a useful object. • Your operating system and MS Office are examples of it.
Joys Of The Craft • The joy of making things • The joy of making things that are useful to other people • The fascination of fashioning puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts • The joy of always learning, of a no repeating task • The delight of working in a medium so tractable—pure thought-stuff—which nevertheless exists, moves, and works in a way that word-objects do not.
Woes Of The Craft • Adjusting to the requirement of perfection is the hardest part of learning to program. • Others set one's objectives and one must depend upon things (especially programs) one cannot control; the authority is not equal to the responsibility. • This sounds worse than it is: actual authority comes from momentum of accomplishment. • With any creativity come dreary hours of painstaking labor; programming is no exception. • The programming project converges more slowly the nearer one gets to the end, whereas one expects it to converge faster as one approaches the end. • One's product is always threatened with obsolescence before completion. The real tiger is never a match for the paper one, unless real use is wanted.
Bibliography • http://safari.adobepress.com/0201835959/ch18 • http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/2007/09/tar-pit.html • The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks.