So, Why Does Software Suck?

Wednesday’s post on David Platt’s “Why Software Sucks” touched on many symptoms of crappy software. Bad UI and security gaffes are one thing. It is quite another to visit these systems as they’re growing in the womb.

I’m talking about the development process itself. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way software is developed?

At work, our system’s second release, which is an agile project that has been under development for over a year, has suffered its second release delay due to last-minute bugs. And this is a team in the company that is the model agile team for all the others.

(warning: software ahead)

Lessons of “Why Software Sucks”

I’m not a usability engineer of any sort, and I don’t pretend to be. I still couldn’t resist buying a book titled “Why Software Sucks” by David Platt, though. This is a raucous read that I recommend to everyone, developer or not.

Platt excoriates us, like Buddy Rich to his marching band, in a hilarious and memorable way. The first half of the book contained three main technical lessons, which I outline here. The second half, namely the final three chapters, are themselves potentially the subject of a separate post.