Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Allen: Yes, I think he had the whole thing. But he replaced some of the software heads with people with hardware experience. And it was really the right thing to do because the hardware people already had a wonderful discipline around building hardware—the chip design and the testing process and all of that. And that was an older and much more rigorous ways of expressing designs. We software people were just making it up. Seibel: So you feel that, at least on that project, that they brought something to the software-development process that saved the project? Allen: It was absolutely necessary, but it was so painful for the software people to have these guys—all guys—move in, knowing nothing about software, and just impose design reviews, design specs, all of this stuff. Seibel: So it did help save that project. Did that embolden folks to take this next step to the Cleanroom process that was sort of a step too far? Allen: Yeah, I think it did. That was the sequence. And the Cleanroom process, the waterfall process, came in through management with a very strong advocate for it.