Tuesday, September 25

Agile, RAD, Extreme Programming.....

Come on tech guys, lets not blind people with science. I have been hearing so much about Agile programming and how it will change the world. In a word, bollocks.

See here for example,

# Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
# Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
# Working software is the principal measure of progress
# Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
# Close, daily, cooperation between business people and developers
# Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication
# Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
# Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
# Simplicity
# Self-organizing teams
# Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Are you seriously telling me that this will be used for any serious application development? Or that you will get great customer service? or documentation? or testing? Or that you wont have close daily cooperation between me and you developers? Or that projects are not built around trusted individuals in other methodologies?

You guys do not make life easy for yourself. Read the wiki article for yourself. Utter rot. In my opinion, as soon as somebody talks Agile, that sort of means that they are (1) going to ask for more money; (2) are not going to deliver what I want; (3) are going to pile on a large pile of brown organic matter.

Do not throw jargon at me, basic good software development can be boiled down to, listen to what I want, tell me what can and what cant be done, how much would it cost, how certain you are on the cost, time and quality and finally what would be the usability and running experience. Once you burrow down, you will see that all this Agile business is just a buzz word. So are you going to produce words or code?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Your argument hinges on the fact that you as a customer know what you want and that you won't think of better ideas/functionality as the project proceeds.

This is never the case on any non trivial project.