Chapter 15. Hazards of the Software Engineering Metaphor

Although software engineering is an excellent approach for some projects, it is an inappropriate choice for most commercial software development. Software engineering is not optimized to provide what commercial projects need—namely, rapid delivery of robust, high-quality applications at reasonable cost. Unfortunately, because the software engineering metaphor is so powerful, many attempts have been made to force-fit this approach to other types of software development. This has proved to be very hazardous for some projects.

You Cannot Do Software Engineering on a Low Budget

As the experience with the space shuttle software showed, the software engineering approach can produce near-perfect ...

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