On Tue, December 12, 2006 12:45 am, Stewart Stremler wrote:
> begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 03:38:48PM -0800:
>>
>> On Sat, December 9, 2006 12:28 pm, Stewart Stremler wrote:
> [chop]
>> > I ran across an interesting article w/r/t XP and CMMI levels. The
> ^^^^^^^^^^^
@@@@@@@@@@@
Doesn't mean anything, but it looks festive.
>> > claim is that XP is a vertical slice through levels 2 through 5:
>>
>> ... and the operant word is "claim." Note claiming source.
>
> And you're claiming that it's level 0. So we have claims and counter-
> claims, and no real discussion, just a bunch of rhetoric that amounts
> to little more than a pissing match.
>
> That being said, I'm not claiming he's right... just that it's
> an interesting viewpoint. Pointing out that he's biased means
> nothing, as nobody in this discussion has been a paragon of
> objectivity and balance. Pot, meet kettle.
It's a little more than he-said-she-said. Advocates of a methodology can
always say they're the distillation of the best of what has come before,
but they really shouldn't redifine what came before, especially to shine a
favorable light on themselves.
Now it is quite true that SEI says that organizations do not vault from
one level to another, but rather adopt (and lag behind) bits and pieces of
the next step up, hold on to bad prcatices from the step below.
But the "vertical slice" is just a little too pat for this little black duck.
Here's why. IMHO the developer-centric fads ^H^H^H^H ... umm,
innovations? ... usually suffer from developers wanting to do the parts
they think are fun and skip the parts they don't enjoy. I know that's what
I want to do.
Analysis is a bore. Comments (unless they're clever and snarky) are too
much typing. I spit on your meeting -- I want to _code_!
Now I think RAD (which is about as far as I've evolved) is great, and I
use some of its principles when I can. But properly done, it has as much
analysis and documentation as, well, waterfall. OK, maybe not _that_ bad,
but you get my point, I hope.
So I break out in a rash when I hear gushing (not from this list,
necessarily, but from people I work with) about the latest Cub Scout
methodology, because in 6 months when the auditors from the FDA come in,
I'm one of the guys who'll have to clean up the mess.
So when the XP guys rapsodize about how they can go twice as fast and have
half the defects and they don't need to leave behind no stinkin'
deliverables, I get a knot in my stomach and wonder what makes them so
different from all the other bags of magic beans I've seen before.
Is that so bad of me?
--
Lan Barnes
SCM Analyst Linux Guy
Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
