The Black Triangle (2004)

http://rampantgames.com/blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html

by emontero1 • 17 years ago

29 10 17 years ago

modeless4• 17 years ago

It makes a nice story, but I think a black triangle moment is something programmers should strive to avoid. Progress should be incremental and visible as much as possible and the system as a whole should always be in a working and testable state.

Working on something for weeks before getting it into a testable state is a surefire recipe for an over-designed system with superfluous features and long debugging sessions.

Scriptor• 17 years ago

What counts as visible progress? In my experience, simply piling up code for every new feature leads to giant monolithic messes with little structure and organization. Since each feature always seems small and easy to do, it becomes tempting to just hack it into what you have without thinking about properly designing it.

Buildings are constructed foundation first, followed by the scaffold. Trying to construct a building room-by-room would be a disaster.

modeless4• 17 years ago

Turns out software isn't like buildings. Buildings can't be refactored during construction, nor do their requirements change halfway through.

Developing software incrementally requires diligence in refactoring to keep the code clean, but development goes faster despite the "extra" refactoring time and the end product is better for it.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

I think sometimes "black triangles" are necessary, but you can advance them in a way that is visible to the programmer/technical people. Most programmers don't write the whole thing then see if it works, but that doesn't mean you can always have additional deliverables (at least from the point of view of the client/stakeholder) at every iteration.

That said, I wonder if he'd demonstrated a need for a custom TCP replacement before he wrote one. That feels a little excessive, but I was born into high bandwidth network coding so I don't remember the bad ol' days as well.

modeless4• 17 years ago

Every week you can't show visible progress to a customer is a week your code drifts farther from their actual desires. The feedback loop is essential to writing good software. It may be difficult to achieve at times but it should always be our goal.

Confusion• 17 years ago

The 'black triangle' moment doesn't need to take a team or weeks. I started on a one man project last monday and had my 'black triangle' moment wednesday after lunch, after which I knew that it could be done the way I envisioned it, that it worked as expected and that I will be done next wednesday.

The Black Triangle (2004)

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