Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

On the way to work this morning, I got the idea for an analogy in my head.

You can compare the U.S. Constitution to a software project. First, there was the Articles of Confederation (a prototype, one to throw away) in 1777. Then in 1790 the Constitution came into effect (v1). Article five of the Constitution describes “the process neccessary to amend the Constitution” (the Change Control Process). Article seven of the Constitution talks about the process of ratifying the Constitution (deployment plan).

After the Constitution came into effect, there were immediately 10 amendments made (the Bill of Rights or bug fixes to those of us in the biz) that were added in response to initial criticism of the Constitution (users unwilling to change). Since the original 10 bug fixes amendments were made, there have been 17 more hacks amendments added to the Constitution. Since 1789, more than 10,000 amendments have been introduced, but few ever get proposed to Congress (triaged).

So what does this all mean? Clearly, the Constitution is an ugly hack, and the framers would have been wise to bone up on some good object oriented design before starting