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Second System Effect
The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence. The phrase was first used by Fred Brooks in his book ''The Mythical Man-Month'', first published in 1975. It described the jump from a set of simple operating systems on the IBM 700/7000 series to OS/360 on the 360 series, which happened in 1964. See also * Anti-pattern * Feature creep * Inner-platform effect * Osborne effect * Sophomore slump * Unix philosophy The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix dev ... References External links * * * * Anti-patterns Software quality {{software-eng-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elegant
Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. Elegance is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness, particularly in visual design, decorative arts, literature, science, and the aesthetics of mathematics. Elegant things often exhibit refined grace and suggest maturity, and in the case of mathematics, a deep mastery of the subject matter. General concept Essential components of the concept include simplicity and consistency of design, focusing on the essential features of an object. In art of any kind one might also require dignified grace, or restrained beauty of style. Visual stimuli are frequently considered elegant, if a small number of colors and stimuli are used, emphasizing the remainder. In philosophy of science In the philosophy of science, there are two concepts referring to two aspects of simplicity: elegance (syntactic simplicity), which means the number and complexity of hypotheses, and parsimony (ontological simplicity), which is th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overengineering
Overengineering (or over-engineering), is the act of designing a product or providing a solution to a problem in an elaborate or complicated manner, where a simpler solution can be demonstrated to exist with the same efficiency and effectiveness as that of the original design. Overengineering is often identified with design changes that increase a factor of safety, add functionality, or overcome perceived design flaws that most users would accept. It can be desirable when safety or performance is critical (e.g. in aerospace vehicles and luxury road vehicles), or when extremely broad functionality is required (e.g. diagnostic and medical tools, power users of products), but it is generally criticized in terms of value engineering as wasteful of resources such as materials, time and money. As a design philosophy, it is the opposite of the minimalist ethos of ''" less is more"'' (or: “''worse is better''”) and a disobedience of the KISS principle. Overengineering generally occur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Bloat
Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep. The term is not applied consistently; it is often used as a pejorative by end users (bloatware) to describe undesired user interface changes even if those changes had little or no effect on the hardware requirements. In long-lived software, perceived bloat can occur from the software servicing a large, diverse marketplace with many differing requirements. Most end users will feel they only need some limited subset of the available functions, and will regard the others as unnecessary bloat, even if end users with different requirements require those functions. Actual (measurable) bloat can occur due to de-emphasising algorithmic efficiency in favour of other concerns like developer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fred Brooks
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book ''The Mythical Man-Month''. In 1976, Brooks was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for "contributions to computer system design and the development of academic programs in computer sciences". Brooks received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999. Education Born on April 19, 1931, in Durham, North Carolina, he attended Duke University, graduating in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, and he received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (computer science) from Harvard University in 1956, supervised by Howard Aiken. Brooks served as the graduate teaching ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Mythical Man-Month
''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'' is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project—involved in writing an ALGOL compiler—would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM 700/7000 Series
The IBM 700/7000 series is a series of large-scale (Mainframe computer, mainframe) computer systems that were made by IBM through the 1950s and early 1960s. The series includes several different, incompatible processor architectures. The 700s use vacuum-tube logic and were made obsolete by the introduction of the transistor computer, transistorized 7000s. The 7000s, in turn, were eventually replaced with System/360, which was announced in 1964. However the 360/65, the first 360 powerful enough to replace 7000s, did not become available until November 1965. Early problems with OS/360 and the high cost of converting software kept many 7000s in service for years afterward. Architectures The IBM 700/7000 series has six completely different ways of storing data and instructions: *First scientific (36/18-bit words): IBM 701, 701 (Defense Calculator) *Later scientific (36-bit words, hardware floating-point): IBM 704, 704, IBM 709, 709, IBM 7040, 7040, IBM 7044, 7044, IBM 7090, 7090, I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OS/360
OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages for the IBM 7090/7094 and even more so by the PR155 Operating System for the IBM 1410/ 7010 processors. It was one of the earliestJust a few years after Atlas Supervisor, Burroughs MCP and GECOS operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device. Although OS/360 itself was discontinued, successor operating systems, including the virtual storage MVS and the 64-bit z/OS, are still run and maintain application-level compatibility with OS/360. Overview IBM announced three different levels of OS/360, generated from the same tapes and sharing most of their code. IBM eventually renamed these options and made some significant design changes: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anti-pattern
An anti-pattern in software engineering, project management, and business processes is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. The term, coined in 1995 by computer programmer Andrew Koenig (programmer), Andrew Koenig, was inspired by the book ''Design Patterns (book), Design Patterns'' (which highlights a number of design patterns in software development that its authors considered to be highly reliable and effective) and first published in his article in the ''Journal of Object-Oriented Programming''. A further paper in 1996 presented by Michael Ackroyd at the Object World West Conference also documented anti-patterns. It was, however, the 1998 book ''AntiPatterns'' that both popularized the idea and extended its scope beyond the field of software design to include software architecture and project management. Other authors have extended it further since to encompass environmental/organizational/cultural anti-pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Feature Creep
Feature creep is the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, especially in computer software, video games and consumer and business electronics. These extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and can result in software bloat and over-complication, rather than simple design. The definition of what qualifies as "feature creep" does vary among end users, where what is perceived as such by some users may be considered practical functionality by others. Causes The most common cause of feature creep is the desire to provide the consumer with a more useful or desirable product, in order to increase sales or distribution. However, once the product reaches the point at which it does everything that it is designed to do, the manufacturer is left with the choice between adding functions some users might consider unneeded (sometimes at the cost of efficiency), and sticking with the old version (at the cost of a perceived lack of improvement) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inner-platform Effect
The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using. This is generally inefficient and such systems are often considered to be examples of an anti-pattern. Examples Examples are visible in plugin-based software such as some text editors and web browsers which often have developers create plugins that recreate software that would normally run on top of the operating system itself. The Firefox add-on mechanism has been used to develop a number of FTP clients and file browsers, which effectively replicate some of the features of the operating system, albeit on a more restricted platform. In the database world, developers are sometimes tempted to bypass the RDBMS, for example by storing everything in one big table with three columns labelled entity ID, key, and value. While this entity-attribute-value model allows the developer to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Osborne Effect
The Osborne effect is a social phenomenon of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current, soon-to-be-obsolete product as an unexpected drawback of a company's announcing a future product prematurely. It is an example of cannibalization. The term alludes to the Osborne Computer Corporation, whose second product did not become available until more than a year after it was announced. The company's subsequent bankruptcy was widely blamed on reduced sales after the announcement. Description The Osborne Effect states that prematurely discussing future, unavailable products damages sales of existing products. The name comes from the planned replacement of the Osborne 1, an early personal computer first sold by the Osborne Computer Corporation in 1981. In 1983, founder Adam Osborne pre-announced several next-generation computer models (the Osborne Executive and Osborne Vixen), which were only prototypes, highlighting the fact that they would outperform the existing model ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sophomore Slump
A sophomore slump or sophomore jinx or sophomore jitters refers to an instance in which a second, or sophomore, effort fails to live up to the relatively high standards of the first effort. It is commonly used to refer to the apathy of students (second year of high school, college or university), the performance of athletes (second season of play), singers/bands (second album), television shows (second seasons), films and video games (sequels/prequels). In the United Kingdom, the "sophomore slump" is more commonly referred to as "second year blues", particularly when describing university students. In Australia, it is known as "second year syndrome", and is particularly common when referring to professional athletes who have a mediocre second season following a stellar debut. The phenomenon of a "sophomore slump" can be explained psychologically, where earlier success has a reducing effect on the subsequent effort, but it can also be explained statistically, as an effect of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
