Building Your Own Programming Tools

Suppose you're given five hours to do the job and you have a choice:

  • Do the job comfortably in five hours, or

  • Spend four hours and 45 minutes feverishly building a tool to do the job, and then have the tool do the job in 15 minutes.

Most good programmers would choose the first option one time out of a million and the second option in every other case. Building tools is part of the warp and woof of programming. Nearly all large organizations (organizations with more than 1000 programmers) have internal tool and support groups. Many have proprietary requirements and design tools that are superior to those on the market (Jones 2000).

You can write many of the tools described in this chapter. Doing so might not be costeffective, ...

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