Engineering Software Correctness

I've thought before about the idea of a tool that lets the developer very specifically define the functional parameters and technical constraints of the software he/she is trying to build. Raganwald quotes Joel Spolsky's tough words about the concept, and I'm inclined now, to agree. "Now, if the spec does define everything about how the program is going to behave, then, lo and behold, it contains all the information necessary to generate the program! And now certain geeks go off to a very dark place where they start thinking about automatically compiling specs into programs..." While I confess to having such thoughts some years ago, I agree with Spolsky's conclusion, that making the spec define all behaviour and constraints of a system means that task is as difficult as writing the software itself. There's simply too much complexity to express without actually writing the system itself. Thus you haven't really accomplished anything.

Posted by Timothy Washington on 2007.12.08| Original post

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