Notes on Fred Brooks's 'No Silver Bullet'
I had a simple problem. An OCR engine found text anywhere on a PDF page. A separate parser could tell me whether a rectangle on that page contained text, an image, both, or neither. Given a piece of OCR output, I needed to decide whether it came from a text layer or from pixels that merely looked like text. When neither answer was reliable, the system would say “unknown”.
The problem was easy to state, easy to understand and easy to test. So why did it take me hours?