Foo Infusion

A periodic infusion of foo from the world of a junior developer

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Agile Hooey

Stevey chimed in recently with his thoughts on (big 'A') Agile development Methodologies. A great read and plenty insightful for those of us searching for the 'one true way'.

I've found myself being perpetually cautious of development methodologies, while at the same time longing for a great one.

I love the idea of pure Object Orientation, but everytime I read/hear about it, the examples are so terrible (in my opinion) that I feel like, "maybe I don't really think this is so great after all." I mean it's probably better to do the half-assed attempt at pure OO that most of us manage than to have no 'basic' structural foundation at all, but if the examples are to be trusted (and why would they be used if that wasn't the intention?) I think it's way off base - what with 'customer' objects having a 'login' method and all of that (seriously, what the hell is the customer doing logging itself in? And what is it logging in to anyway?)

The same goes with XP and Agile development. I absolutely LOVE pair programming, but probably I wouldn't if I was forced or expected to do it, and I'm not sure all projects need it all the time. Besides that, they will never go for at my current office, so it'll never gain any traction here. I love the idea of contracts with the team and with 'the customer' (marketing) but come on, how the hell am I supposed to know how long it's going to take to do something until I've done it. And even then it would be different the next time I tried it. Geesh!

I think I'll go through this article a few more times to try to glean what I can from it. Mostly what sticks out in my mind right now though, is that I really need to get a job with Google!