Currently at the Agile Development Conference in sunny Salt Lake City
I'm sure there will be many blogs about the event, so I'll just make a few notes.
talked about the intersection between Risk, Agile, and Peopleware.
As an industry, we have allowed ourselves to become dominated by a fear of failure. Most of the conventional methodologies are concerned with ensuring success by narrowing goals. The flaw in the CMM approach is that having the most "mature" team in the world doesn't necessarily help you build the most succesful products.
This is because too many organisations just won't allow people to tell the truth. Most people on the team know immediately when a project is dead but they're not allowed to act on that, so they're stuck trying to survive while doing obviously pointless work. Too many people in our business are simply not used to success. Success is empowering and motivating, people remember working on succesful projects for years.
We need projects that are more ambitious, so that the successes are more rewarding, and we can pay for them by killing off doomed projects earlier. Is it too much to ask that 1/2 our projects are outright winners?
"Never lose the feeling of success" That's what this business should be about.
Talking to Jim Newkirk and others from Microsoft's Patterns and practices group , one of their tasks is to improve the code examples that ship with the .Net environment which are often terrible: not object-oriented, no separation of concerns, that sort of thing. The really bad part about these examples, is that MS developers all over the world are using them as best practice and pasting them into their application code.
This is like the use of CFC's for refrigeration. It did the immediate job really well, but now we have a hole in our ozone layer that will take decades to repair, and many countries are still producing them. A short-term solution, a generation to recover.
Over beer, Eric Evans came up with a Law of Bad Programmers, that one bad programmer will consume the effort of two good programmers.
I was talking to Diana Larsen and asked her whether she found any differences when working with Geeks and other groups. Definately, she said, you need to know your stuff with Geeks because they will probe any weaknesses in your position, but once you've passed the test they're with you all the way. Other groups will play along and be polite and friendly, but not really get involved. That's why Diana likes working with Geeks but some of her colleagues won't touch us.
Posted by stevef at June 23, 2004 3:26 PM