TPT September 2007

D evelopments in D esign, P roduction & M anagement S oftware

S oftware is software. Or is it? The website of a company that creates custom software for companies and organizations presents a comparison between software as most of us understand it, and software for industrial purposes. Quite clearly, this second category is another proposition altogether. The differences of scale, complexity, and volume may remind readers of a certain age of CP Snow’s theory of the ‘two cultures’ – science and the humanities. But the first sentences of the first section, on code-writing for ‘academic’ vs. industrial software, seem more likely to put tube and pipe makers in mind of the fail- safe preoccupations of their own business:

© Ubeco GmbH

Net code is the part of a program that actually solves the problem if all goes according to plan. Gross code covers all the additional lines of code required in order to handle errored input and data and to trap supposedly impossible system errors. Since defence against ‘supposedly impossible errors’ is never far from their minds, tube and pipe professionals are squarely in the gross-code camp, where the software has a net/gross quotient of 0.5 to 0.25. This means that between 50 per cent

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Since defence against ‘supposedly impossible errors’ is never far from their minds, tube and pipe professionals are squarely in the gross-code camp

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and 75 per cent of the lines of code in a given program go beyond the basic application to deal with issues such as robustness, stability, ease of use, and reliable operation.

Here, too, are found the lines of code for help functions, authorization, checking, logging, and the like. By comparison, typical university [net code] exercises have a quotient in the region of 1, and correspondingly fewer and coarser duties. The importance of small net/gross quotients in industrial software development is very readily grasped in the tube and pipe industry, where every production run reinforces the correlation between small steps and large consequences.

The software company whose information has been drawn on boasts that its product is tailor- made and intended to live long, and that it is therefore structured carefully – by means of object-oriented methods. It is a declaration that resonates long and loud with tube and pipe makers.

© Aicon 3D Systems GmbH

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S eptember /O ctober 2007