There be dragons here.....

It would seem that there are 25 Most dangerous programming errors in the world today.

Only 25? Wow.

It would seem that a group of IPCC like people from all manner of companies across the US and also a few government bodies have got together and decided that these 25 problems are a real issue and should be stamped on as soon as possible. Which is probably correct.

There are some real names on this list, which incidentally can be viewed here http://www.sans.org/top25errors/

What is actually concerning is that they state that these errors happen because present IT training, both academic and professional doesn't cover how to avoid them.

So, is this a case that University Education doesn't quite cut the mustard? Or is it a deeper problem.

When I started out in IT, there wasn't a lot of training or college courses available. I knew what I wanted to learn but the only way to do it was to learn it yourself. You could get a good Pascal course if your college had a computing department, but I wanted to do C, and BCPL and of course learn about object oriented development, it was fairly new back then. Yikes, I am getting old.

More recently, I had a student placement working for me over the summer, the guy was an adept programmer and was more than up to speed on programming technique however, the problem here was that although he cut code, he didn't have a clue about business process. He had no idea about how a sales order should be constructed, nor how this might relate to an invoice. We didn't get onto the granularities of stock control. Maybe I was asking too much of this guy but he was a 2nd year student, so he was about 19-20. I look back to my own career and at 19-20 I had written a number of accounting systems, stock control packages and other database applications across a variety of hardware.

So, I am asking, is academia failing the software development industry not only in that they don't teach business process but they don't show how to avoid the major software development issues, like the list of 25.

This could all come under a heading of best practice, but you know I hate best practice, because it ages. What is best practice today, may not be tomorrow, or next week or next year. This is because we evolve, hopefully we get better and find new more useful ways of doing things.

So, are these 25 your list of the most unwanted, or would you have an alternative set?