Tony Nassar wrote:

> I'm on a contract right now at a gov't agency, and
> there's a reason that I can only realease to
> production every 6 months: the stakeholders won't
> allow it, because they regard releases as
> destabilizing. This is to say, of course, that they
> would be horrified by the very idea of continuous
> integration. Somehow, they find pages and pages of
> BRUF reassuring; I won't belabor how perverse that
> is.
> 
> So what does one do?

Thou shalt sort features by business priority.

Here's why:

 - every week, an internal release can demonstrate
   more business value

 - frequent releases force you to attend to the 
   whole programming system

 - code supporting high-value features, implemented
   first, gets tested released and reviewed most
   for the rest of the system

 - new features refactor their code into the code
   supporting the old features, so their tests
   support each other

 - code written first becomes the _easiest_ code
   to change. Traditionally, it's super-hard.

> Well, I'm not going to work for
> 6 mos. w/o even knowing if my code does what I think
> it ought to, or what I've told them it's going to.
> That means retrofitting tests to legacy code,

Read /Working Effectively with Legacy Code/ by Mike
Feathers.

BTW the gov't no longer enforces waterfall. It was all
a bad dream.

> because I also can't work without knowing what the
> existing code base does. The BRUF culture of my
> current workplace doesn't require me to work in the
> BRUF way (i.e., waste countless hours pretending
> that I know what nonexistent code does, or how it
> will pass nonexistent tests). In fact, it more or
> less forces me to do as much XP as I am able with
> the few developers who will pair with me, so that
> *I* don't have to wait six months to find out what
> I've been doing. 

Good. You have both authority and responsibility. Use
the BRUF book they gave you as source, but take care
to excize from it the concept of a decision. Each
weeks's iteration represents fresh decisions, and each
release feeds results back into the next week's
decisions.


=====
Phlip
  http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces


                
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