Peter Miller (software engineer) explained

Peter Miller
Birth Name:	Peter Alexander Miller
Birth Date:	1960 10, df=yes
Birth Place:	Ramsgate, New South Wales
Death Place:	Green Point, New South Wales
Occupation:	Software Engineer
Nationality:	Australian
Spouse:	Mary Therese Miller (nee Lynch) (married 198?-2014)
Children:	Rowan Miller (1989-present)

Peter Miller (16 October 1960 – 27 July 2014) was an Australian software developer who wrote Recursive Make Considered Harmful^{[1] [2]} and created Aegis and cook. He also proposed a set of "laws" for modern software engineering and architecture in the early 1990s:

Miller's laws are:

1. The number of interactions within a development team is O(n!) without controlled access to the baseline. If the development team does have controlled access to the baseline, interactions can be reduced to near O(n), where n is the number of developers and/or files in the source tree, whichever is larger.
2. The baseline MUST always be in working order.
3. The software build/construction process can be reduced to a directed, acyclical graph (DAG).
4. It is necessary to build a rigid framework of selected components (aka the top level aegis design).
5. The framework should not do any real work, and should instead delegate everything to external components. The external components should be as interchangeable as possible.
6. The framework should use the Strategy pattern for most complex tasks.

External links

• Debian Project mourns the loss of Peter Miller
• Archive of Miller's website including software, books, and papers
• Maintenance repository of Miller's Aegis on GitHub
• Maintenance repository of Miller's Cook tool on GitHub
• Home page of Miller's Aegis software configuration management tool on SourceForge

Notes and References

1. News: Recursive make Reloaded . https://web.archive.org/web/20070715095642/http://www.linux-mag.com/id/2101/ . usurped . 15 July 2007 . John . Graham-Cumming . Linux Magazine . 15 July 2005 . 13 April 2018 .
2. Web site: Google Scholar.