pliantalliance.org

I just wanted to mention that pliantalliance.org’s Wordpress theme is based on the “LastRegrets” theme by Frederic de Villamil aka neuro. I’ve made some minor mods to the theme to fit my tastes, but most of the work was neuro’s. Thanks!

[Ed. The following was originally posted on spew.whalespine.org on September 10, 2005. It is reposted here with my permission for essentially historical purposes.]

I’ve been meaning to comment about what Paul said a few weeks ago, but just haven’t had the chance. He is quite right that agile has been commoditized and is now seen as a software development process itself.

People are getting “Agile” books and saying “Let’s do Agile”. Then they do what the book says. This is fine for a while until they realize their situation doesn’t quite fit the book. Then they are forced to either stay with the book or change how they are doing things. Most stay with the book because “The book must be right”. They try to smash their square peg into a round hole and things start to go downhill. This assumes that the people are even able to recognize when the book doesn’t reflect the situation they find themselves in. Sometimes people are so caught up in following the book that they can’t see that what the book says isn’t bringing benefit and, even worse, is causing damage to their project. Anyway, whether they know it or not, these people are now doing process for process sake and we are right back where we started from before this whole agile thing came around. Doing a bunch of stuff that doesn’t help just because we think it will (because someone wrote it in a book), and not bothering to take the time to examine what we are doing in order to change it for the better. Except this time it is worse because people think they are doing the right thing by “doing Agile”. Like Paul said, we should _be_ agile not “do Agile”. Using my new term, the goal is (or should be) to be as pliant with our software development process as possible.

I had the following quote by Galileo’s dad pinned up in my cube at InfoInterActive (arguably the birth place of PSD). From the quote, it would appear that blindly doing what someone else does simply because they say so has been a problem for quite some time now.

“It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly.”

- Vincenzio Galilei

[Ed. The following was originally posted on spew.whalespine.org on July 16, 2005. It is reposted here with my permission for essentially historical purposes.]

James Bach has some good things to say about “best practices”, namely that they don’t exist and we are wasting our time trying to figure out what they are. He’s a testing guy, but all his points can be applied to software development in general.

My favorite quotes:

“There are no best practices. By this I mean there is no practice that is better than all other possible practices, regardless of the context. ”

“Excellence in an intellectual craft simply cannot be attained by ignorantly copying what other people say that they do. ”

“Go ahead and follow your favorite practices. Just don’t preach that the rest of us must follow them, too. Keep your process standards to yourself. If you want to make a suggestion, make one that takes context into account.”

[Ed. The following was originally posted on spew.whalespine.org on June 27, 2005. It is reposted here with my permission for essentially historical purposes.]

Ok, here’s the situation. There are many ways to develop software. Some of them are generally recognized as being good, some of them are generally recognized as being bad. However there are no absolutes. There are no 12-step programs for successful software development. Sorry to break it to those of you who have zealously attached yourselves to this methodology or that methodology, but nothing, and I mean _nothing_ is guaranteed in software development. There are too many technical, social and political issues which differentiate every single software development effort to be able to even come close to defining the “right way” of developing software. That’s my first point.

(more…)