The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick Brooks
Summary:
Chapter 13:
This chapter focuses on three main things, how to design you program to avoid bugs, component debugging, and system debugging. One way to design your program to avoid errors is to use a top down approach which basically modularize s the project. Component debugging is basically what programmers use now to debug programs and at it's current state, it is interactive. Programmers can go back and forth between testing their code and writing it.
Chapter 14:
This chapter focuses on not letting delays in the schedule become compounded. Basically, do your best to not fall behind and if you do, do not let that delay push back anything else or else it could turn into a catastrophe. A PERT chart is useful for this because it doesn't allow the delays to go unnoticed and gives everyone a clear picture of where the project stands.
Chapter 15:
This chapter focuses on what documentation is required for any project. The main documentation needed is how to use this program. This also includes the purpose of the program as well as basic requirements needed to run the program and many others. Self documenting code is where we are headed and for the most part it works very well.
Discussion:
These chapters focus on 3 things that most programmers are less than excited about doing. Even though these tasks seem extremely tedious, they often a key part of successful and well written programs. Personally, debugging isn't too bad for the most part as long as the code is written well. Poorly written and commented code makes debugging a nightmare. It is best to have some standard for you code so that it is easy for everyone to debug it later. Also, documentation is probably a programmers worst nightmare but now that we have self documenting code, it is starting to become much easier.
