Alex has been doing software development since 1990. His current passion is how to bring soft back into software. He firmly believes that our industry has reached the level of sophistication where this lofty goal (i.e. bringing soft back into software) is fully achievable. One of the amazing ways to accomplish that is to adopt the 'fail fast' approach by crafting a measurable goal/test and then iterating until the test passes. Following that, send the sniffing police dog to check the cargo (i.e. use mutation testing), and if the dog does not detect any illicit material, your code is optimally structured. Which means it is now back to being soft, maleable, pliable. Which means you have improved the flexibility of the business operations.
Alex is presently consulting at WorkSafeBC, an organization dedicated to ethical treatment of safe work environments in support of employees and employers in the province of British Columbia. Alex is responsible for leading and ensuring prudent software engineering practices at the organizational level.
To read more of Alex's writing on technology, visit his blog: http://digitalexprt.com/blog.html
Authored Comments
Correction -- in the above reply, the first sentence should read:
If you want to play the engineering game, you have to have some qualifications.
If you want to play the engineering game, you have some qualifications. In the case of software engineering, you must join the game by having an arsenal of algorithms in your back pocket.
In this case, I reached out for the oldest algorithm in recorded history -- the Babylonian algorithm.
But hoping to be able to blindly tackle engineering problems without any prior education is the fool's errand.