FlexDev, Pliant, Post-Agilism, FooBar
I’ve come across yet another independant redefinition of what pliantalliance.org is getting at. It comes from Lidor who once again hits the nail on the head with FlexDev. FlexDev is defined as “creating the optimal process for each project”. Brilliant.
Lidor has a another post in which he points out that it doesn’t matter what you call it and I totally agree. Unfortunately, as he discovered, people insist on talking about how they are approaching a project so naming the “process” is somewhat helpful. Lidor came up with “FlexDev”, Jonathan came up with Post-Agilism and I came up with PSD. I’m sure there are others out there with other names. Comment below if you already have your own name. I think it gives credence to all of our thinking that we have independently gotten frustrated and have attempted to redefine how we are doing our jobs.
on July 4th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Personally, it still amazes me how many people don’t seem to understand that software development has very little in common with real-world-object development. The creation of software is most like the creation of art. To be good it must be inspired. To be of interest it must be unique. To be worth something it must be different.
Basically, if someone else has already done the same thing, just use that. If you want to make something new, you are going to have to wait until the person making it up makes it up.
Real-world-objects can follow more of a process where there is a design, followed by a highly skilled person/team following that design and creating instructions on how to turn that into a widget, usually producing a prototype. Then a team of sufficiently trained monkeys can start following the instructions to make the widget. This works because presumably you are making more than one widget.
Think about the type of people who make the concept cars featured in Auto shows. Then thing about the type of people who make your car. Those are completely different. In software engineering, the second set of people is not needed as reproduction of software is free. Therefore, attempting to apply any type of process or engineering that is designed for that type of production is folly.
Hire intelligent people who can be the ones to design and create your software, but also give them the freedom to create and design. Anything in software that is worth building is something that has never been done before. If it has never been done before there is no way of knowing what process could possibly be the best to apply. You can, however, have people who can recognize when what they are doing isn’t working and change direction accordingly.