I've been reading...

Guns, Germs and Steel. By Jared Diamond. It has been an absolutely fascinating read. As I read a picture kept on coming to my mind:

Taken from page 142 of my copy of Rapid Development by Steve McConnell

When I first understood how an AK-47 worked, it seemed so simple, and so ingenious. And I wondered how it had taken over 400 years of gun use for humanity to arrive at this simple design. All the requirements to make the AK-47 seem to have been in place in one form or another for a long time before the gun was actually first designed and built. Guns, Germs and Steel answered the question for me: in that we humans build incrementally on what has been done before. Very, very rarely do we take dramatic leaps. We iterate in small steps. 

Now wonder the spiral model of software development is considered a software development best practise. It is nothing more or less than a natural way for us human beings.

9:16:01 PM