A story on slashdot linked to a very interesting read on how good a community based encyclopedia is when everyone can edit it. Now, granted the author is biased, he still has some really interesting points. I really liked 4th last paragraph where he talks about no matter how good an article is, since it's edited by the public, it can always be "edited into mediocrity".
I guess that it shows that edits are only truly improvements when the person doing the editing has at least the same level of knowledge of what they are editing for (correct facts, spelling, ...) as the author. I guess it's like taking a really good piece of sw and having it maintained by co-ops who do not understand why it was built a certain way and actually make something worse the more they work on it. Good read...
Sometimes, not all the time, but some times, the coop students are more knowledgable then the people who built the system in the first place. Often in the past, coders were just people who knew how to code, and didn't have any training in how to do it well, they just did what they thought was best. There's somethings that are are only taught in formal education, and are not completely obvious and will probably never be figured out by someone who just learns to code on their own.
ReplyDeleteThe other question that someone should ask, is what makes a piece of software "good". Something that does the specified task, yet is so poorly designed that it takes a new person an entire year to figure out how the system works is probably not a "good" piece of software. Even though those who have been working on it for 10 years, and completely understand it probably see nothing wrong with it.
ReplyDeleteYes, sometimes the co-ops DO know more than the other people there, but those are usually dangerous situations to start with.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for what makes software "good", I am sure that you can remember lots of ways to judge this with the formal education that we took. Things like reliability, scalability, ease of use / change, portability... all the "ilities". ;-)
Hello. I am new here. It is very interesting.
ReplyDelete