I admit it, I’ve been on the internet for quite a while (I could tell you that my ICQ number is 95941970, but I haven’t logged in for years) and my habits haven’t changed. I still regularly get technology news from slashdot, and today was no exception. An interesting article was Here Be Dragons: The 7 most vexing problems in programming. Without wanting to spoil the article for you by giving away the punchline, there are indeed some frustratingly difficult problems mentioned: multithreading, security, encryption are among the list.

All of these problems are sideshows to what I see as one of the largest and most vexing issues in programming: the fundamental rule to business administration is that your income should be greater than your costs, but software makers still, by and large, don’t have a way to compare the expected value of their work to the expected cost of the work.

The problem in space

Different software teams – and individuals – do work in different contexts, and in different ways. The lone wolf micro-ISV is not the same as an individual contract developer. The in-house IT team does not have the same problems to solve as the shrinkwrapped software vendor, and those developing web services for public consumption have yet another context. The team with core hours all working in a single office is different from the distributed team inhabiting multiple time zones.

How much of this variety is essential, and how much is accidental? How much of it is relevant, when considering some intervention, process change, or technique? Consultants speaking at conferences (another context with its own similarities and differences from the others) don’t tend to talk about what researchers in fields such as psychology would recognise as “threats to validity” of their work, but given all of the ways in which software is made, we need to know whether some proposal applies to all of them, or to some of them, or whether it has been applied to some of them and might be applied to others, and what would assist or confound that application.

The problem in time

What are the accepted, tested and validated ways to identify who will be using and otherwise impacted by our software systems? To know whether they can use the system we propose, and whether it is the best system for their intended use? To ensure that our proposed software systems treat those people ethically? To understand the cost (to ourselves and to others) of constructing those systems? To deliver the systems to the people who will interact with them? To choose which people are or aren’t entitled to access? To build a representation of the problem to be solved, to validate that representation, to validate the solution against that representation?

Where an answer exists to those questions, what are the contexts in which it is valid and what are the threats to its validity? How has that answer been compared with other possibilities? How has it been confirmed? How has it been challenged? How can I find out about those confirmations and challenges? How can I find out about any alternatives? What techniques exist to weigh up those alternatives quantitively, rather than relying merely on the persuasiveness of the conference speakers promoting those solutions (and, by the way, the books/screencasts that describe the solutions)?

The lack of a problem

Why should I care? There’s enough money in software at the moment to mean that I don’t need to be any good at knowing what works or doesn’t work, I just need to get out there and sell some software. In the rare situation that I don’t make my money back, that’s just the market forces at work, and I can go and get a high-paying job somewhere while I lick my wounds, and pick another programming language/framework/platform/whatever it is that’s going to make my next attempt definitely succeed.

Clearly, this bottomless pit of money that arises from society’s unwavering faith in software and its ability to cure all ills is never going to run out. There’s no need to worry ever about whether we’re doing it right, because there’ll always be someone out there willing to pay for us to do it wrong. Life as a programmer is like some kind of socialist utopia where whether we’re making a valuable contribution or not, the rest of society is looking out for us.

That’s going to last forever, right?