The Odd Couple of Creativity and Discipline

摘要

Some time ago, I wrote a book called Software Creativity. In that book, I initially planned to take the position that software engineering (the development and maintenance of software products) was a field in which creativity and innovation counted for much more than discipline. I was tired of, and angered by, the claims of many in the software engineering field that the solutions to the problems of software lay in discipline, formality, and quantitative reasoning. My 40 years of experience in constructing and maintaining software solutions, and my six years in the academic world ruminating over the relationship between the software field's literature and that experience, suggested the opposite — that the solutions to the problems of software lay in innovation, flexibility, creativity, and qualitative reasoning. Of course, for huge, many-person software projects, discipline was a necessary evil. Still, I felt that brilliant people, not brilliant process, were the way to progress.