Guest Lecture: David Lorge Parnas

The Distributed Systems Group of the Information Systems Institute invites to the guest lecture of David Lorge PARNAS: Professor Emeritus at the McMaster University, Hamilton Canada, and at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Wednesday, 17. November 2010, 14:00 - 18:00 h, EI 10, Gußhausstraße 27-29, 1040 Wien Precise Documentation: The Key To Better Software (overview) If I had to identify a single prime cause for the sorry "state of the art" in software development, it is documentation. Failure to document designs properly, reduces efficiency in every phase in a software product's "lifetime" and is a major cause of the low quality software that we see today. If I say, "documentation" to software developers, they assume that I am discussing a collection of wordy, unstructured, introductory descriptions. They picture thousands of pages that nobody trusts and nobody wanted to write. If I say, "documentation" to Engineers in more traditional disciplines, they envision precise blueprints, circuit diagrams, and mathematical component property specifications. Developers do not know how to produce equivalent documents for software.