Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 - (Page 60)

Best Practices Special C3 PROGRAMMING code. Moreover, there exist add-on modules to facilitate closing and tools to create contracts, but the bulk of programming effort is in coding. This balance needs reevaluation. The contract phase defines a binding agreement between business and programming. Business provides requirements in some format—spreadsheet lists, business use case diagrams, or process diagrams. The process of transferring the business requirements to a software “plan of action” is informally the contract phase. This phase needs be formally framed. The contract reflects back to the business what the programmer will provide. The contract defines, from a programming perspective in programming/business jargon, how the programmer understands the business needs. The programmer then works from this document in developing the code. The code component is the most familiar component to programmers because it focuses on the functional requirements, architecture, software interface design, algorithms, and coding of instructions that make up software. Existing programming tools have focused almost exclusively on this component of programming. Code generators, debuggers, and code-analysis tools all contribute to reducing defects in code and have done well in this domain. But when there is no clear, unambiguous finish line, the software is never complete and incomplete software does not get delivered. For this reason, the close phase must be clearly demarcated for programmers. Most of the time the finish line is implied and as rules in business change, the finish line gets moved. The solution to control shifting finish lines is an explicit set of objectives that need be reached to conclude that the software is complete. TDD controls this by requiring that programmers formally state the tests that the soft- ware shall pass to qualify the software as finished. C3 and the Software Development Lifecycle C3 integrates seamlessly and complements the software development lifecycle. C3 more finely defines the interface and expectations in the hand-off between different roles in the cycle. While the roles of contract and close can be assigned to others on behalf of the programmer—business analysis can take responsibility for contract and quality assurance for close—the value of having the programmer fill these roles is valuable because it both crystallizes the solution in the mind of the programmer and reduces risk of misunderstandings. It’s analogous to asking a person to repeat, in their own words, what is understood. Peer review is a common method to reduce error and resolve uncertainty. C3 improves on peer review by providing a view from a different perspective. Individuals in the same organization performing similar tasks tend to follow similar routines and overlook similar events. By bringing programmers to overlap with the sphere of business analysis and quality assurance, you get an orthogonal view to a proposed solution. This alternative perception can strengthen both sides of the interface—the input from business analysis and quality assurance can to guide the programmer in focusing on core requirements and ignoring noncritical and nontestable features. Summary Figure 1: Software development lifecycle roles. Figure 2: The three C's — contract, code, and close C3 programming is a more fine-grained implementation of the programming phase and can be implemented in any software development lifecycle model. It adds necessary responsibility to programmers to ensure that they understand the scope of the business problem, yet limits the programmer to solving only the problem. An additional value is that the programmer perspective on business requirements and quality assurance provides observations not generally made by those dedicated to those roles. This perspective can identify areas of ambiguity and opportunities where programming can provide additional added value. DDJ 60 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l November 2008 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer's Notebook Saving Open Source Conversations iPhone Building Your Own Web Server Green Telnet What's New In Boost Threads? Testing Service Oriented Architectures Test Case Generation, UML, and Eclipse Unit Testing Web Services C3 Programming The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames Effective Concurrency

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

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