Development fascinates People
Development fascinates people because people like pretty paintings and good music and things that work. Too much like the superstitious witch hunters of the Dark Ages, people seem to think that creativity is some sort of magic. Notions about creativity fascinate people, but they rarely understand their errant perspective. More than once, I have seen people propose that creativity is some sort of throwing paint onto a canvas. That people describe such actions as creative and then also describe great musicians as creative reveals that lack of good judgment.
Highly creative people like Michaelangelo, Don Knuth, and Bethoven regularly disciplined themselves. Even Salvador Dali made studies.
Highly creative people pay great attention to the technologies around them. The creativity was in the mental vision and in the skill of deploying available techniques and materials. Michaelangelo was able to convey his ideas by using sketches, words, scaffolds for his helpers, and his own actions. This should sound suspiciously like the attributes of good designers.
Programming is hardly creative, nor should programming be creative. Instead, the creativity occurs early in the process. When waterfall methodologies dominate the actions of an organization, many people in the various stages feel that they worked hard. "We worked so hard thinking this up." "We wrote such good documentation." "We had such a good plan and we worked so many months on it; why can't the programmers make it work." Maybe those people spent much effort but are their specs valid? Waterfall projects can succeed, but waterfall methods have several big drawbacks:
Highly creative people like Michaelangelo, Don Knuth, and Bethoven regularly disciplined themselves. Even Salvador Dali made studies.
Highly creative people pay great attention to the technologies around them. The creativity was in the mental vision and in the skill of deploying available techniques and materials. Michaelangelo was able to convey his ideas by using sketches, words, scaffolds for his helpers, and his own actions. This should sound suspiciously like the attributes of good designers.
Programming is hardly creative, nor should programming be creative. Instead, the creativity occurs early in the process. When waterfall methodologies dominate the actions of an organization, many people in the various stages feel that they worked hard. "We worked so hard thinking this up." "We wrote such good documentation." "We had such a good plan and we worked so many months on it; why can't the programmers make it work." Maybe those people spent much effort but are their specs valid? Waterfall projects can succeed, but waterfall methods have several big drawbacks:
- The lack of frequent verification allows bugs to linger and even multiply
- The long intervals of time between actions and feedback puts great stress on human memory
- The large amounts of effort and thus cost before verification greatly increases the risk
- The most creative workers do little in the early stages
- The high expectation that those wizard-like programmers can fix bad designs
- The possibility that the basic need will change before the project has any return on investment