Nov 17, 2008 9:33 AM by Ilya Sterin
First, methodologies are only as good as the people that apply them. I hate the thought of process over people. Intelligent people will find a way to produce good software, agile or not. Morons will fail even with the process. Software development is more art than it is science, though I wish the people that never made it as software developers would stop trying to pile process on top of process and think that engineers are code monkeys that can develop good software by following some process. Process is good, but smart people are better.
Also, it’s not that agile is failing, software projects are failing and have been failing before agile and will be failing after. Again, this is art and creativity is required not process.
Thanks Ilya for the comment!
Having worked with several Object-Relational mapping frameworks in the last few years, I got to a point where I couldn’t justify their complexity in my project. We often talk about the mismatch between the database and the object worlds, and that is where ORMs are often stated and referenced for “bridging the gap”!
Well I prefer to call it lifting the gap, or highering the gap, to have it now between DAOs and the rest of the code than having it between database and code.But I wouldn’t call this in any way reducing the gap.
(more…)
On JAOO 2007 I could, with the help of Floyd, organize a debate between Bob Martin and James Coplien about TDD and DbC. This is the most interesting debate about the subject I’ve ever heard of. A lot of things I wanted to say have been said here. And I am proud to announce it :)
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/coplien-martin-tdd
Thanks Cope, thanks Bob.
Today, many software project management and architecture approaches tend to parcel out work on a project creating hierarchical layers. This helps to simplify both developers work and management. However, the undelying information shielding among layers can potentially create a gap between developers and the software they are working on, if developers task are totally taken out of functional context.
(more…)
Larger team size prevents from adopting the whole range of language abstraction tools and puts constraints on productivity. Reg Braithwaite believes that tools should not be tuned to the size of the team. He advocates for building teams around the tools and keeping them small. It appears however that team growth is often inevitable. What can be done then to maintain quality and productivity?
(more…)
This post has been originally posted on infoQ on Religion driven industry: buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection
James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issueâ€. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective . (more…)
