On Sunday 05 May 2002 16:36, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: >. . . > For us europeans it's very strange to know that there are individuals > who don't believe in the theory of biological evolution. > Everybody (even religious people) take it for granted. >. . .
Although feelings might be stronger in the US, I disagree that everybody in Europe takes the theory of biological evolution for granted (well, I'm only half-european I guess, geographically but unfortunately not politically ;-). Evolution vs. creation is debated around here as much as around most of the planet I think. But I fully agree that we have to "evolve" software, we're not good enough to "create" it (how about if God decided to write Cocoon 3 ;-) >. . . > 3) many small steps are better than one big step, even if they achieve > the same result. Why? because environmental feedback enters the loop on > every step. . . yes yes yes! Feedback, it's all about feedback. I keep telling my coworkers and students to commit and publish their work as often as possible, it makes a huge difference in quality. >. . . > 4) even design can be made public and incremental: with the right amount > of abstraction, paper design can lead to discovery of problems even > before the system is built. >. . . Agreed. Paper (vs. complex drawing software that slows down your own feedback loop) is an important tool here IMHO. I like the Agile Modeling idea (www.agilemodeling.com) of sharing design models as early as possible by not bothering to make them pretty first. Send in your scanned back-of-an-envelope design models please! Maybe distributed development processes would benefit from graduating from mostly text-based communication to more graphical forms - jpeg scans of hand-drawn design sketches would help getting more feedback at the design level IMHO. My 2 not-even-euro centimes. -- Bertrand Delacrétaz (codeconsult.ch, jfor.org) buzzwords: XML, java, XSLT, cocoon, mentoring/teaching/coding. disclaimer: eternity is very long. mostly towards the end. get ready. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
