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Kode vicious

The Unholy Trinity of Software Development

By George V. Neville-Neil
Communications of the ACM, February 2017, Vol. 60 No. 2, Pages 34-36
10.1145/3029597
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The Unholy Trinity of Software Development, illustrative photo — Credit: Andrey Popov

Dear KV,

I have read your columns for a few years and you have written a few times about testing and documentation, but you have not written about the relationship between the two. Many large projects, including the one I am working with now, keep their tests and documentation separate from the code and from each other. I have argued with my team about putting both of these closer to, or even embedded in, the source code, but there are always a few engineers who refuse to allow anything but code and comments in the source files. Their argument is about maximizing the screen space for code context, but that seems like a more reasonable argument for a 25-line terminal than for a modern development environment. What arguments would you make to get this software team to adopt a more holistic approach to the system we are working on?

System Integrationist

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