Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

5
  • 7
    +1. Good example for the standardization (standard sheet of a simple bolt). In IT, rare are the components which are normalized. Take registration forms: every website reinvent their own, and few are the developers who know how their registration form behaves with unicode, with empty strings, with strings too long, etc. Commented Jul 29, 2012 at 23:20
  • 2
    @MainMa: poor example, do you create your buttons, textboxes, option boxes, option boxes from divs? No, you reuse the browser's form elements; and the browsers used the Operating System's form elements. Commented Jul 30, 2012 at 15:31
  • 5
    I were rather speaking about the internals, not the controls. Take some random website. Can you use Chinese characters for the password? Can you use 25-characters passwords? What will happen if you put a whitespace in password or user name? All this could be normalized, but it's not, and every person is reinventing the wheel for every project, often badly, i.e. no hashing and/or salting, or passwords limited to sixteen characters (example: MSN), etc. Commented Jul 30, 2012 at 15:49
  • 5
    Changing IT from "artisans" to "factories" may not be possible. Factories are executing a process which has already been created. Workers in a factory execute their process with little or no human thought. Many factories have replaced humans with robots due to this fact. In software you are not executing a process, but creating one. Creating software would be more akin to designing the factory and it's processes rather than running the factory. Although software creation could benefit from standards, it cannot fundamentally become a factory. Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 19:19
  • @ArseniMourzenko it's a bad comparison to compare "data sheets for bolts" (i.e. tools, equipment) to "registration forms standards". Registration forms would be more like "a roof" or "a front door" (indeed, there are a zillion ways to make those). What a bolt compares to is more like a processor pipeline behaviour. It's nowhere close to what we need: reliable OS (with rigorously defined characteristics, not "data may hit the disk depending on the mount options used") and ditto development tools (they need to be able to check 90% of the code for standard properties) Commented Oct 7, 2017 at 23:10