[comp.software-eng] MITI and stuff

kemnitz@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Gregory Kemnitz) (05/17/89)

I recently read an article in Computerworld which discussed the (at this time)
relative failure of the Japanese to develop a competetive software industry,
and MITI's plan to try to build it.  The article discussed money and management
which the Japanese are throwing at the "software engineering process", and
gave intonations of doom over the lack of coordinated efforts by Americans to
address this "threat".  Another article in the same issue discussed the
involvement of American software development companies with large Japanese
partners:  in a case study the Japanese manager was discussing the "lack of
discipline" of the American software engineers, and the Americans were unhappy
with the "micromanagement" (my word) that the Japanese imposed on the joint
project.

Since the Japanese successes in engineering have been almost exclusively
due to rigorous and astute application of time-honored principles of engineering
and manufacturing to incrementally improve existing products (IMHO), can they
hope to have success in software, where the engineering process is poorly
understood and where, IMHO, too much management == too many meetings == drive
away the best people == bad product??

The following is a digression...

It also seems to me that the best software people tend to be more like pure
mathematicians than engineers in how they solve problems, frequently making
intuitive leaps that turn 10K lines of code necessary for a solution into
50 lines.  (In doing proofs, this kind of thing makes a mathematician's day)
Someone made a point recently that the problems that software is used to solve
tend to be discrete, while other engineering problems are almost always
continuous.  Any mathematician will tell you that analyzing discrete systems
is in general nastier than analyzing continuous ones (ie calculus won't work,
etc), so is it possible that some theory of "discrete engineering" is really
what is necessary?

				Greg Kemnitz