Seeing Kevlin Henney again at the Goto conference reminded me of a quotation he cited at Agile on the Beach last month.
In 1968, NATO funded a conference with the then provocative title of Software Engineering. Many people feel that this is the moment when software development lost its way, but the report itself is more lively that its title suggests.
It turns out that “outside in” development, with early testing is older than we thought. Here’s a quote from the report by Alan Perlis:
I’d like to read three sentences to close this issue.
- A software system can best be designed if the testing is interlaced with the designing instead of being used after the design.
- A simulation which matches the requirements contains the control which organizes the design of the system.
- Through successive repetitions of this process of interlaced testing and design the model ultimately becomes the software system itself. I think that it is the key of the approach that has been suggested, that there is no such question as testing things after the fact with simulation models, but that in effect the testing and the replacement of simulations with modules that are deeper and more detailed goes on with the simulation model controlling, as it were, the place and order in which these things are done.
It’s all out there in our history, we just have to be able to find it.