18May/090
Conceptual Integrity
Check it. This is a great quote from Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month". Completely un-technical, and yet it could have helped prevent several technical mishaps my teams have coded themselves into. Moral integrity vs. conceptual integrity, now there's a question.
I contend that conceptual integrity is the most important con-
sideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit
certain anomalous features and improvements, but to re?ect
one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many
good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering,
Addison-Wesley, 1975. Second edition 1995.
