Virtual Thought

Okay, no, not really. But in that funny and scathing way of his Joel says no to agile development practices.

So let me try on the Joel hat for a while. In the example he gives, Speedy doesn’t actually have a customer on site and doesn’t actually produce any stories about the user experience. Which agile method, exactly, proposes starting out by coding without talking to the user? If he was truly agile, Speedy wouldn’t go off and code in the weeds for three weeks. He’d have gathered some user input, generated user stories, defined some basic models and mock-ups… y’know, everything that an agile software developer would do.

And I’m glad Mr. Rogers at WellTemperedSoft had such a positive experience… unfortunately for him, though, he appears to have stopped talking to the user during those three weeks of development and has suffered from some requirements drift. Too bad Mr. Rogers wasn’t talking with his customer or else he could have noticed that drift. And, y’know, too bad Mr. Rogers has a disconnected relationship with his managers or else the managers would be more understanding when Mr. Rogers has to adjust the end product to meet his changing requirements.

To be fair, I don’t like searching for silver bullets and holy grails and I’m not a fan of zealotry. But I do think that the argument should be fairly represented, at least.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 8:21 pm and is filed under soapbox, coding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.