As I read Michael Feather’s points in this blog post, I found myself agreeing so many times that I felt I had to link to this.
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341d798c53ef0147e1235b4c970b
I work in a company where the “scientist” in me is constantly challenged and where most in the developer group fall into the engineer group. I think it’s an excellent example of a polarity that exists (strongly) in our company. The business puts extraordinary pressure on the developers to deliver a working solution in the shortest time possible. The natural response is to forego practices that many in the Agile community consider “best practice” in order to just keep up with the pace of change and new features.
I personally get the same sense of satisfaction when patterns just emerge from the iterative process I follow, which is not strictly TDD, but is more or less a hybrid of it. It bothers me that refactoring is not given much attention in our daily development activities, but I am finding myself now questioning many of the beliefs which I held to be incontrovertible (am I being dogmatic?).
I think my most important takeaway from Michael’s post is the unmistakable position that we MUST question our approaches regularly to improve and to seek new approaches that make us better. Out with the old, in with the new. Constantly focus on pragmatism. If doing something doesn’t improve your product or your time to market, drop it.
I also want to better understand his concept “language granularity”. I believe it has an important impact on how we do development here. It touches on a very important business pattern here. Namely, the constant churn our teams find themselves in and the costs associated with the changes that are required in order to satisfy the latest/greatest requirements.
Great read Michael …
