Visual Basic —

Demand More Rigor, Not Less

A desire for quality and technical purity encourages a rigorous approach to development. Formal methods such as VDM (Vienna Development Method), Z, and B are rarely used in commercial development. But methods that promote rigor (such as SSADM) continue to have a high level of use. Do they work? They can work well in the hands of skilled project managers who know what to use and what to leave out for a specific project. In unskilled hands, the level of rigor applied tends to be higher than necessary, project costs soar, and schedules slip.

In some organizations, the consequence of the failure of rigor is that business managers decide to do their own development. In others, hacking takes over. Visual Basic 3 was one of the main tools of the hackers. To continue to use this approach with Visual Basic 6 is at best a waste and at worst a disaster. The development process for a project should be decided by the project manager with the guidance of the analysts and designers. Prescribing a method from outside the project does not work. A Pathfinder approach provides a mechanism for understanding major projects before you commit large numbers of staff to them.

Teach the Fundamentals

Tools and methods are only as good as the people who use them. They are no substitute for training. Staff must know why as well as how. The why comes first.

The basics of computing-how chips work, how memory is used, what operating systems and algorithms do-are all essentials for IT professionals. The lack of this fundamental knowledge means that developers effectively cannot use powerful tools such as Visual Basic 6. They need to understand exactly what the tool is doing and how it works. This knowledge is even more important as the tools become more powerful because they hide so much. To use distributed objects effectively, for example, one has to understand how the technical mechanisms that create the objects work, not just how to make them work. How is a local call turned into a remote call? What is the effect on the network? How does it perform with high transaction rates? What is the impact of other network traffic?

The fundamentals of software engineering must be taught to staff. The principles of data management, security, configuration management, project control, and so on apply to all development approaches. The divisions and disciplines of separate development, test, and production environments are critical to successful implementation. The ability to produce code quickly in Visual Basic 6 doesn't relieve developers and managers of the duty to produce the right code and to use the technical infrastructure correctly and efficiently.