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What can a software engineer learn from a real estate architect?
If architects would design buildings the way software architects create software, we would be in for a big mess with buildings crashing left and right just because you happen to open the wrong door at the wrong time.
How can we get some of the architectural expertise and apply it to software design? Start with the educational system, argues Oracle's Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson in an interview with Computing.
"I would like to see university programmes certified so you couldn't get out until you could prove at least basic secure coding. You couldn't do that in civil engineering. Look at architects, for example. They can design the most amazing buildings, but they're also secure. I didn't walk into this building today and wonder if it was going to fall down."
Software companies are making progress here by the way, at least that's what Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told students at Stanford University earlier this month.
Mary Ann Davidson. Photo: Oracle
May 26, 2005 at 10:43 PM | Permalink
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Having now been in the "computing" business for a long time this type of story comes around with a monotonous regularity, in one form or another. Of course the short answer is that architects and builders did build structures that fell around peoples ears. Over the several thousand years that man / woman has been building habitable and ceremonial structures there have been numerous disasters and these mistakes have learnt from and acted on. Over the few years, 50? that people have been programming a great deal has also been learned and applied and will continue to do so until software reaches the same levels of success, maybe.
If however we are going to draw parallels between the two professions then what happens in software is that the software engineer turns up at the clients with a solid well designed structure, at which point the client insists that it cannot be that way and must be built with state of the art, untried and untested materials, must (metaphorically) be 4 miles high and stretch out of a windswept, storm prone, earthquake zone landscape for 800 yards, take the weight of 600 people (a second) and be done in half the quoted time and three quarters of the budget.
Posted-by: John Howitt | 27 May 2005 13:02:45
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