Software Engineering discussion

This book primarily focuses on construction/programming/coding and closely related topics of the software development process. This provides a nice contrast to the Mythical Man Month book, which treats construction as a solved problem, or more accurately as only a piece of the overall software development process, and one that is not subject to significant further productivity improvement. Therefore, MMM argues that our focus, in terms of overall productivity, should be elsewhere. This is mostly an argument used for large projects.

However, I believe that there are substantial benefits to focusing on construction, beyond productivity, in areas like maintainability, quality, readability, consistency, etc. And, as the book says, all phases of the software development are optional, except for construction!

This was a nice introduction chapter. I could tell that the prose was enjoyable and flows nicely (for my taste).

I agree on the contrasts with MMM and the scope set in this chapter, but it was interesting to see that MMM was referenced a few times already in just the first two chapters.

I feel the construction scope is fine. With 900 pages just on construction, I'm glad the line was drawn somewhere.