There are many ways of designing and implementing a system. We are not trying to say that you should immediately adopt the techniques presented in this book in place of how you currently design and write software. Specifically, what we are saying is that this is how we design and implement software in real-world applications.

In many of the more complex systems I have had the same experience. Doing little design up front I would plow into the coding, by the 50% stage I would normally be ahead of the game, and at the 90% stage I would be 90% complete and patting myself on the back.

And then it happened! I now use the term "the complexity explosion" small changes in the software would cause problems throughout the system. The customer would throw in "unplanned-for" changes. I could no longer picture the system clearly in my head. The last 10% of the project took another 90% of the time. I knew something was wrong but didn't have the tools or training to explain what, why, or how.

In the end I put it down to software being a pain. A few years ago when Jon came to the company he was touting a language called LabVIEW. This became the company standard, so I had to learn it. The first application that I wrote (in a very unpleasant style I hasten to add) was a small temperature logging effort. It became clear to me that something was still wrong.

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