Friday, March 10, 2017

Art becomes Engineering when you have a Reproducable Process

The complaint that software engineering isn't really engineering because each thing you make is often its own piece of art is often true.  But the real art of software engineering, isn't making one-offs.

Rather, it is figuring out how to take simple inputs into a decision making process that generates high quality code in a reproducable way.

I often build code that is more complicate then if I just wrote it because I take the time to figure out what data is actually driving the decision making process that the code has to follow.  Then I put that data into a table and let the code do its work on it.

When the process has been effectively tested, adding more data adds more functionality at a greatly reduced code.

This same method is, by the way, how FHIR is built.  FHIR is truly engineered.  The art was in developing the process.

   Keith

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