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Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 Real Software Engineering by Glenn Vanderburg

Confreaks · 30.4K views · 2011-10-24 · 51:57

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Overview

Glenn Vanderburg argues at Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 that university-style software engineering does not work, and asks what real software engineering would look like. He revisits the waterfall model and what engineering means in other fields.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it for changing minds about whether programmers can be called engineers, and for its take on how waterfall was misread.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2013–2025

Topics

Software practice, open source & careersPython, Ruby & scripting languages
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waterfallengineering disciplinesoftware processagileconference talk

What people said

yesenadam · 2020-05 · Strong recommendation

I always thought calling programmers engineers was very weird until I watched this great talk: Real Software Engineering , Glenn Vanderburg, Lone Star Ruby 2010 [VIDEO] which explains what various kinds of engineers actually do. Not at all dry and boring like it might sound! From the YouTube blurb: Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all. That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for methods that work. What then, does real software engineering look like?

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yesenadam · 2021-05 · Recommendation

I thought calling programmers "engineers" was very odd until I saw this great talk: Real Software Engineering by Glenn Vanderburg Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 [VIDEO] Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all. That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for methods that work. What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being "anti-engineering" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development.

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gcandal · 2016-01 · Recommendation

I first came into contact with this article via [VIDEO] , which is a pretty decent analysis on how people misinterpreted the original concept.

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Sources

Video by Confreaks, played through YouTube.

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