Wayne Allen's Weblog

Joel turned me on to a Rands In Response posting titled "Incrementalists versus Completionists" where Rands relates a discussion with a co-worker where the co-worker found a problem, Rands suggested a temporary and incomplete solution that could be achieved in the time allowed. Rands was then stunned to find out his co-worker saw that as worse than doing nothing.

Check out the interview Software Development Magazine did with Jerry Weinberg.

In many organization I've encountered there is this artificial distinction between the new development group and the maintenance programming group. Why on God's green earth would you want to do such a thing?

Chris Matts turned me on to the JBehave project (here and here). At first I was skeptical because I didn't see anything different from the xUnit frameworks. However, on contemplating for a moment the fact that I also don't believe that xUnit tests are "Tests" and that I like the "Example" terminology from Brian Marick. The "Behavior" and "Should" terminology start to feel right to me. I'm not sure we need a new project to achieve this. At least with nUnit we can name the methods anything we want, and if you really wanted to you could create new attributes to replace [Fixture] and [Test].

Ward Cunningham and I have been invited to represent the Agile software development proponents at a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Rose City SPIN and PNSQC. The panel discussion is titled "Agile and Traditional Development: A Creative Synergy" and will be 5:30pm on October 13, 2004 in conjunction with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).

Clark Ching had a brief post relating the requirements churn rate (25%) to the average cost of change (50x) yielding a 13.5x increase in the time required to complete all requirement in a project assuming the original estimate didn't take changes into account (and how many do).

Have you seen goal/action conflicts like this in your organization? Secondarily why do organizations feel they have to hide these goals?

I ran across this little gem today: