One of the biggest challenges in building software is specifying what needs to be built. To communicate effectively, try using examples.
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One of the biggest challenges in building software is specifying what needs to be built. A blueprint captures all of the valuable information we need in order to build a building and details such as the tensile strength of the material and how to build a foundation are available through other sources. Blueprints have no ambiguity. They are clear specifications.
But software is much more difficult to specify than the structure of a building. Programming languages are fundamentally different than spoken languages and there’s rarely any one-to-one mapping between them. We speak in generalizations much of the time, but computers are very, very specific all of the time. This is a challenge in the way we think and communicate.
Communication by its very nature is a serial activity. When we describe processes we do so sequentially. This often implies a procedural approach and can lead to overly concrete requirements when we talk about software.
Good programmers know that there are other approaches to software design than procedural and that modeling software with objects can improve maintainability.
