Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
XP was the first process which got *programmers* to accept the need
for testing. It deserves a huge amount of praise for that.
Speak for yourself. Unit testing was a huge part of Smalltalk
development going back at least a decade more than that, not to
mention kind of well understood by folks with experience just about
everywhere.
And how many Smalltalk projects were there vs. C/C++/Java?
Well, certainly more than Java. ;-) Certainly fewer than C/C++, but
probably as many as C++, if not more. ;-)
Exactly. What the Smalltalk weenies were doing in 1995 was just as
irrelevant to the mainstream as Lisp weenies in 1985.
I guess I would argue that Smalltalk moved pretty strongly in to the
mainstream during the early 90's, at least enough that the unwashed
masses had a chance to learn about best practices from them. Throw in
that the experienced folks on non-Smalltalk projects were already doing
this stuff and there was plenty of opportunity to learn. Those who
didn't are probably doing them wrong now anyway. ;-)
XP moved testing from a bunch of useless Smalltalk weenies to the vast
collective consciousness of the "unwashed" majority of programmers.
"useless Smalltalk weenies"... nice.
Well, the SCRUM guys claim that Beck basically stole their idea
(which he doesn't much deny either), and of course Agile is really
just a broader tent than XP, some would say the same about CMM.
Waterfall I have to take issue with though. I have seen improvements
when a team moves from waterfall to XP, SCRUM, CMM and RUP, and the
discipline to do it right came from how awful things were under
waterfall. ;-)
The reason why I don't have quite the same distaste for "Waterfall" is
that I have seen Waterfall work. But, yes, it does require discipline.
Given that teams that moved from one to the other exhibited improved
performance, I guess perhaps XP/SCRUM/CMM/RUP don't require as
disciplined a team to achieve as well. ;-)
--Chris
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