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Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

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Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#81

Post by kqr »

majkinetor wrote: post #80
kqr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are incorrect on both accounts. It's easy to spend upward of $10000 on really robust automation, when the same manual process would cost only $3000 over its usable lifetime, and the economical-but-less-robust automation costs $1000 over the same period. The robust automation, in that case, has over 10× worse ROI. What's wrong with that calculation? The thing about really robust automation is that for it t…

I think you don't understand automation. > It's easy to spend upward of $10000 on really robust automation, when the same manual process would cost only $3000 over its usable lifetime. Manual process is incomparable to automation, because $3k human will make mistakes as humans are not good robots. Also, your miserable $3k human can now do normal thing. > The thing about really robust automation is that for it to pay…

Humans indeed deviate from standard process. This causes mistakes but it also prevents them.

It sounds like you think robust automation takes zero minutes to create, since you think of robust automation as always freeing up time. In my experience, robust automation is something that takes considerable time to create and maintain.

Maybe you know of some trick I don't. But since you keep writing about "failing scripts" and "flaky automation" despite my attempts to correct such misunderstandings, I'm starting to suspect you're interpreting my comments as what you want them to say for the sake of your argument, rather than what I'm trying to say.

Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#82

Post by m0rc »

As a baseline on what is know and not know about managing software projects, I always recommend Robert L. Glass Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.

More speculatively, I think that the following biology readings are inspiring:

- Gerald Jay Sussman, Building Robust Systems an essay. In general, biology should be a source of inspiration for engineers.

- E. Goldratt, The Goal

Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#83

Post by majkinetor »

kqr wrote: post #81
majkinetor wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don't understand automation. > It's easy to spend upward of $10000 on really robust automation, when the same manual process would cost only $3000 over its usable lifetime. Manual process is incomparable to automation, because $3k human will make mistakes as humans are not good robots. Also, your miserable $3k human can now do normal thing. > The thing about really robust automation is that for it to pay…

Humans indeed deviate from standard process. This causes mistakes but it also prevents them. It sounds like you think robust automation takes zero minutes to create, since you think of robust automation as always freeing up time. In my experience, robust automation is something that takes considerable time to create and maintain. Maybe you know of some trick I don't. But since you keep writing about "failing scripts"…

> This causes mistakes but it also prevents them.

I have never experienced that someone wants to keep human if machine could be put to use. No, humans do not prevent mistakes for highly unimaginative repetitive work. Even if it happens, its outlier.

> It sounds like you think robust automation takes zero minutes to create, since you think of robust automation as always freeing up time. In my experience, robust automation is something that takes considerable time to create and maintain.

It takes, and it gets MUCH better with experience. However, the time is finite, unlike that with human corrections.

> Maybe you know of some trick I don't.

Probably - I know how to write robust and resilient automation scripts that over time converge to almost 0 failures.

Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#86

Post by rramadass »

kqr wrote: post #79
rramadass wrote: post #77

I think it is worthwhile to first look into the fields of Complexity Science/Complex Systems Science and Systems Thinking/Systems Theory for overarching insights : [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system and https://complexityexplained.github.io/ ] and [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking and https://thesystemsthinker.com/systems-thinking-what-why-when... ] For Software specific issues i highly rec…

Am I doing something wrong if I'm unable to find that Parnas collection as a digital book? I've read some of his papers and they were very influential on me. Would love the book but I rarely have the energy to bring a print copy of books.

In this case the "paper copy" of the book is very much worth it :-) The articles are all foundational, timeless and gets to the heart of the matter unlike most books today.

Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#87

Post by eklavya »

majkinetor wrote: post #80
kqr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are incorrect on both accounts. It's easy to spend upward of $10000 on really robust automation, when the same manual process would cost only $3000 over its usable lifetime, and the economical-but-less-robust automation costs $1000 over the same period. The robust automation, in that case, has over 10× worse ROI. What's wrong with that calculation? The thing about really robust automation is that for it t…

I think you don't understand automation. > It's easy to spend upward of $10000 on really robust automation, when the same manual process would cost only $3000 over its usable lifetime. Manual process is incomparable to automation, because $3k human will make mistakes as humans are not good robots. Also, your miserable $3k human can now do normal thing. > The thing about really robust automation is that for it to pay…

You are making some really bold claims and you really might be an expert but I think you should open your mind to the slight possibility that others might also know what they are talking about. The OP specifically started with the premise that fast changing businesses would spend all their time fixing their automation and it might not make sense in that situation. Can’t comprehend how that doesn’t make immediate sense.

Let’s say I have a crawler which automates some data gathering. It’s sources keep changing frequently, robust automation here is probably a research project and simple automation is orders of magnitude more bang for buck.

Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#89

Post by atulatul »

sakesun wrote: post #47

For me it's Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software The essay in the the beginning of the book gave me a profound epiphany back then.

I agree so much about the essay. One of those contents where I felt like underlining every single sentence.

Re: Ask HN: Best books on managing software complexity?

#90

Post by rmetzler »

david_allison wrote: post #70

Michael C. Feathers - Working Effectively with Legacy Code Scott Wlaschin - Domain Modeling Made Functional: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F#

Eric Normand - Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking

I also bought the Scott Wlaschin book, but I must say I like Eric Normand's book a little bit better. Since the examples are also in JavaScript (but applicable to a lot of languages), I think it's easier to follow for everyone who's coming from an OOP background.

I'm also looking forward to Yehonathan Sharvit - Data-Oriented Programming: Unlearning objects.

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