Parleys.com: The Truck Driving Problem

magine that you are responsible for driving a truck across America, along highways, through cities and around detours, dealing with whatever idiosyncrasies that weather and traffic might throw at you. Now imagine that your job is not to drive the truck, but program a computer to drive the truck for you. How would you go about turning over everything you know about driving to computer? Trying to plan a large software development effort is not much different than trying to plan the development of a software package to drive a truck across America - without access to the truck. In software development, we have been asked to solve too many truck-driving problems. And when it turns out that we have been handed an impossible problem, it's usually the developers - not the process or the scale of the problem - that are held responsible for the failure. At its core, software development is the process of gradually finding ways to turn over more and more of what we know to computers so that we have more space left in our minds to discover ever more interesting things. This talk will look at successful development efforts on the scale of the truck-driving problem - the development of the Internet, for example - and offer a proven but neglected theory about how to develop complex software.