Simply amazing in concept. He's trained captive crows to collect spare change. Now posits a device to train wild crow to do the same...and more! Forget the sharks with frickin laser beams! I scream for crow! [Beefheart] I've got an enourmous murder of crow here and am willing to bet that this wouldnt be taxable income! Joshua Klein, Mobile, Personal, and Future Technology Specialist
Sometimes it seems my entire career as a software professional has been framed in this long suffering debate about development methodologies. I think I subscribed to the big planning, big requirements, big design upfront concept for a few early years. Eventually I noticed the soul crushing death marches, huge overruns, and scandalous politics so common to PMI/waterfall projects and nearly went back to law school.
It was my good fortune to work on several dot com startups and the works of Booch, Rumbaugh on UP and later Ambler, Beck and Fowler on agile approaches that convinced me that there was indeed a more profitable and humane way to produce software.
It worked well when the focus was on innovation and entrepreneurial ventures. When there was a mix of people focused and actually engaged in delivering product, not satisfying prediction. Once the companies dragged in a few too many investors and the obligatory sr. management that things started to come off the rails and the focus became, to my mind, too much focused on prediction, rigorous estimation, and unrealistic expectations.
Again I find myself in an organization struggling with how to manage the software process. In this case we are playing from a technical deficit and have a service orientation rather than a product orientation. We try to say yes to everything and often over commit and under deliver. We have the typical mix of middle management that has, to my mind, spent dangerously little time involved in the craft of software development and tends to see software as a manufacturing problem, not a creative one.
This debate will heat up in the coming months and I'm not sure I have the strength to fight it again. Scott Ambler once told me "You either change your organization or you change your organization."
This post is both a place for me to dmup some links and fodder for the coming discussions and a plea to anyone who's listening to chime in on which end of Ambler's paradox I should take up.
