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Postcard From GDC 2003: Programming Keynote Delivered By Fred Brooks
Delivered to a standing-room-only crowd, Brooks talked about software organization processes, starting from one-person programming teams and then moving on to larger and larger teams. He joked that one-person teams are easy to handle: there's no need to document source code, there's no need to discuss design ideas, and so on. Many stories from the trenches were used as examples, introducing popular concepts about what works and what simply doesn't in the software industry. Brooks is an advocate of the "software architect" role - an individual who understands the user's needs, and ensures consistency across a whole product. He illustrated this with a story about a company engaged in developing a new kind of computer. The company had created an 800-page specification for the computer, and each engineer knew the intimate details about certain components in the computer. However, no single individual understood the system as a whole, and as a result, nobody was able to take responsibility for its entire design. Ultimately the company killed the project because of this, and the company went out of business soon thereafter. Dr. Brooks talked about the role of software architects, conceptual integrity for software products, and many other subjects such as version control and communication in large software teams. He commented specifically about the game industry, opining that game developers are lucky in that we can test our own products, unlike, say, the aerospace industry where software developers don't necessarily understand the intricacies of the product they're working on from a user's standpoint. It was great to hear advice from a person who's been in this industry for such a long time; someone who has made significant contributions to the way software in general (and games in particular) are designed and coded. ______________________________________________________ |
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Features
Today
Fred Brooks shared decades of knowledge about software engineering and
a wealth of fun and informative stories at the GDC's programming keynote
address. Dr. Brooks worked at IBM in the OS/360 days, and led the Department
of Computer Science at UNC for 20 years. He's also well known both by
his book The Mythical Man-Month and his paper titled, "There
Is No Silver Bullet". 