Developing Software As If Your Life Depends On It!
The skills and attitudes necessary for survival in today’s dot-and-dash market.
A free-flowing foray into the world of software development
as told by Steven Marcus.
Marcus Software Designs, Inc.
smarcus@MarcusSoftwareDesigns.com
The theme of this topic is to provide the audience with enough cross-discipline appreciation for what goes into a software development effort.
Much of the presentation is based on experience and my interpretation.

The theme of the discussion is about your survival and what you should know and do to survive. Again, taking the perspective of having your life at stake. If you will, think of this discussion in line with: “what if you only had one more year to live. What would you do?” You’d probably get really serious and discriminating about how you’d spend your time.
Today I’d like to play with a similar and see what happens.

Types of efforts: Transaction-based, control-based (rules), planning-based (reporting). Different types of software intentions call for different types of talents.
Many systems evolve from transaction-based to planning-based to control-based.

Appropriate technologies for different intention types. E.g. the role of database in an application. For some apps a vendor-specific rdms feature set may be appropriate. For other intentions the vendor-specific rdbms is a liability.