Raccoon's Research

We wrote a book You Cannot Predict the Future (Amazon) about the foundations of software engineering. Many people treat software from a mathematical point of view. We treat software from psychological, sociological, historical, philosphicial, and statistical points of view. We make suggestions about how sponsoring organizations and project managers can develop better software.

The wikipedia definition of software engineering that I like.

Chaos theory in software engineering and programming languages. Many traditional top-down and bottom-up concepts in software development seem much too simple to describe my programming experience. So, I strive to find and understand chaotic and middle-out relationships within software development. I focus mainly on the following three subjects that share chaotic or multi-level structures.

Chaos in Models, Life Cycles, and Strategies: The Chaos Model, Chaos Life Cycle, and Chaos Strategy describe chaotic structures within software projects and processes explicitly.

Learning Curves: Learning Curves describe the most common patterns of improvement in stable processes. Most learning curve equations embody a fractal relationship between unit cost (or unit defect rate) and cumulative output.

Post-Object Programming: Post-Object Programming points out both top-down and bottom-up influences within class heirarchies. I believe that developers actually use class hierarchies in a middle-out way.

Bibliography: My publications.

Workout Timing Table Generator: Generates workout timing tables for runners and swimmers.