July 2008 Entries
I've tried Use Cases and seen them not work. The main reason? They are really heavy handed and developers hate updating them. Customers don't even want to see them. A manager telling me to update the use cases or the functional spec is akin in my mind to someone I don't know telling me to take my medicine. I am one of those annoying developers who is going to ask, "Why am I doing this?" And bad news, if you don't have a good answer, I am going to look at you cross-eyed. Developers in general (especially...
If you've ever been a programmer in a bureaucratic environment, you've surely thought of yourself as the spawn of the red-headed step child and the family mule. Performing heroic acts in a bureacracy is patently a bad idea. Why? Because if you've jumped the Grand Canyon on a motorcylce once, surely you can do it again or anything else for that matter. The bureaucrats are only half the problem here folks. Our damnable need to please (or to not rock the boat) is the other half of the issue. You're...
Documents don't kill understanding. Documents in our American culture kill understanding. Why do people who specialize in bending words forget to transfer meaning? The problem with lengthy requirements documents are They never tell the whole story no matter how much you write The users of these documents (programmers) never ask any questions because its all right there in the spec The writer of said document never questions if his intent was understood because its all right there in the spec Conversations...
In the Agile thought-space, Big Up Front Design (BFUD) is a four letter word. There is a reason for this. Many times people who envision projects (usually the guy with the biggest wallet unfortunately) don't realize that they don't know everything. More to the point, they don't know how little they actually know about the end user. So they envision the initial requirements for the system, and they boil them down into finer and finer grained detail, until they have something that is implementable....