Moles and Holes (WAS RE: is that a fork in the road?)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Did I say do waterfall?  Maybe the 
old *rapid prototyping* buzzword has 
run out of buzz so you now need XP.
Build and built-to are what the 
rapid-proto apps do.  Say, Visual Basic?

It's the tests that you contract to, 
not the iteration interval for meeting 
a design goal.

What XP promises is to lash two moles 
together and give them sunglasses so 
the glare doesn't bother them 
while they dig a deeper hole than 
the last one.

I read the online XP docs when we 
went over this topic last fall. I'll 
read the Kent book someday.  Meanwhile, 
I have to read the proposals on my 
desk and figure out which ones of the 
features we will say yes to so the 
moles down the hall will dig the 
holes where the water is.

Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: HUGHES,MARK (Non-HP-FtCollins,ex1) [mailto:mark_hughes@non.hp.com]

  Ah, no.  I'm an XP programmer, and what XP promises is that the
customer will ALWAYS get whatever functionality is most important to
them, right away (well, at the end of an "iteration", which is 2 weeks
around here).  Waterfall development gives you a big-bang creation in
some longer period of time...  if it doesn't run late, if the design
specification is actually what the customer still wants by the end of
the development process (which is almost never the case), if the
engineers are so inhumanly smart and/or psychic that they can do perfect
design up front, if the requirements never change, and if absolutely
nothing goes wrong.  That any software at all is delivered by waterfall
is nothing short of a miracle.

  XP is primarily concerned with delivering "contractually specified
features".  It isn't perfect, but small, self-correcting steps are far
more accurate than a single aimed shot at a dodging target.

  Please take the time to actually observe the process, or even just
read the books, before making future inaccurate claims.