Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers

Re:Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers by szundi on Monday October 10, 2022 @03:56PM (#33155759)

This guy lost me when I read that I should implement Plan B first.

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Re:Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers by perlgeek on Monday October 10, 2022 @04:58PM (#33156313)

I guess that's inspired by the famous "plan to throw one away (because you will, anyway), from Freed Brooks if I remember correctly.

IMHO it makes sense if Plan B is much simpler, but not as efficient as Plan A (remember, this is a game developer, everything is about efficiency). You build Plan B is a prototype, and could still fall back on it (and iterate on it) if Plan A fails.

If Plan B is more complicated than Plan A, doing it first sounds... dumb.

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Re:Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers by o4b on Monday October 10, 2022 @08:19PM (#33157960)

If the point was "write a prototype/less efficient version prior to the more time consuming but better quality solution" then maybe they should have written that.

The connotation with plan B is you do plan A, then if it doesn't work, you do plan B. If you are supposed to implement plan B first then really plan B is plan A.

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