There are certain stories that should simply be a part of every technologist’s background – they explain a kind of thinking about the world. Most of them, like the story of Mel or Winston Royce’s “Waterfal” Paper, are very old and pre-date the internet.
Most of them are collected in “Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions“, a wonderful primer on system effects in software development and arguably a major pre-cursor to “agile” literature.
One little piece I found absolutely wonderful in Wicked Solutions is “The Parable of Two Programmers.”
And, today, thanks to a guy named Mark Pearce, I found it on the intarwebs.
Enjoy.
Cool…I’d been looking for a reference to that for ages.