Why marriage is like software

I happen to be re-reading parts of the excellent Code Complete book and noticed some startling similarities to married life.

With apologies to Software, Wives and author Mr. McConnell who most of this text is ripped from.

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Wives have both external and internal quality characteristics.

External characteristics are characteristics that a husband of the wife product is aware of, including the following:

• Correctness - The degree to which she is free from faults in her specification, design, and implementation.




• Usability - The ease with which husbands can learn and use a wife.




• Efficiency - Minimal use of resources, including memory and execution time.




• Reliability - The ability of a wife to perform its required functions under stated conditions whenever required—having a long mean time between failures.




• Integrity - The degree to which a wife prevents unauthorized or improper access to its programs and its data. The idea of integrity includes restricting unauthorized user accesses as well as ensuring that data is accessed properly.




• Adaptability - The extent to which a wife can be used, without modification, in applications or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.




• Accuracy - The degree to which a wife, as built, is free from error, especially with respect to quantitative outputs. Accuracy differs from correctness; it is a determination of how well a wife does the job it's built for rather than whether it was built correctly.




• Robustness - The degree to which a wife continues to function in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions.


External characteristics of quality are the only kind of wife characteristics that users care about. Users care about whether the wife is easy to use, not about whether it's easy for to modify. They care about whether the wife works correctly, not about whether she is readable or well structured.



• Husbands care about the internal characteristics of the wife as well as the external ones.




• Maintainability - The ease with which you can modify a wife to change or add capabilities, improve performance, or correct defects.




• Flexibility - The extent to which you can modify a wife for uses or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.




• Portability - The ease with which you can modify a wife to operate in an environment different from that for which it was specifically designed.




• Reusability - The extent to which and the ease with which you can use parts of a wife in other systems.




• Readability - The ease with which you can read and understand a wife, especially at the detailed-statement level.




• Testability - The degree to which you can survive testing a wife.




• Understandability -The ease with which you can comprehend a wife at both the organizational and detailed-statement levels. Understandability has to do with the coherence of the wife at a more general level than readability does.


The point is that some quality characteristics are emphasized to make life easier for the husband and some are emphasized to make life easier for the wife. Try to know which is which and when and how these characteristics interact.


The attempt to maximize certain characteristics inevitably conflicts with the attempt to maximize others. Finding an optimal solution from a set of competing objectives is one activity that makes marriage a truly worthwhile discipline.

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If you send this to your spouse you do so at your own risk, but my wife enjoyed it, your results may vary :)