Improving Wetware

Because technology is never the issue

Time to move beyond Agile?

Posted by Pete McBreen 29 Nov 2009 at 16:35

Just found a very interesting post from Luke Halliwell on The Agile Disease that looks at the fit between Scrum and the game industry, but many of his points are relevant to other development domains.

[Agile] was designed by consultants, aimed squarely at the world of in-house enterprise IT: a world where mediocre developers work for large corporations that don’t understand software development, but can afford to buy in expensive consultants to “save” their runaway projects.

Having daily stand-up meetings is ludicrous; it exists simply to protect against the dysfunction of team members that never talk to one another. … In anything resembling a normal, common-sense team, people will surely raise blockages with their manager as soon as they occur and not need to wait for a daily meeting!

After that rant Luke went on to describe what worked in his field, and even had a post after attending a Scrum Master course.

Amusing quote from an economist

Posted by Pete McBreen 25 Nov 2009 at 19:11

Talking about why things are a lot more complicated than we might otherwise think.

Books are thick cos things are hard – Richard Denniss

A comment towards the end of his talk: ENVS1001 - Resources, Environment and Society - 2009 audio podcast, Week 05 Panel B: Can Economics Save the World? Richard Denniss (Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University on iTunesU)

Software development as a scientific activity

Posted by Pete McBreen 22 Nov 2009 at 22:21

Given that I do not agree with the characterization of software development as software engineering, it was somewhat of a surprise to find that there are a lot of parallels between software development and science.

Debugging and testing are probably the most scientific activities, in that developers have to make guesses about what is happening and then devise experiments to prove those guesses wrong. Developers also have to make predictions about how the systems they are developing will behave and then defend those predictions against speculations made by uniformed observers and occasionally defend against misinformation conveyed by financially interested parties.

One conclusion I could make from this is that the politics of software development are very similar to the politics of science. Practitioners try to pretend that there is no politics involved as it is all perfectly rational and understandable, but because people are involved it is all about politics. As soon as we start making predictions, then how we interpret those possible futures has a big effect on the actions we might take. This then becomes the realm of politics and it is that part that many software developers forget about (and many scientists as well) - Politics Matters.

We probably could have saved ourselves , but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damned cheap. – Kurt Vonnegut

To celebrate the politics of science I’ve included a graphic reminder in the sidebar that small changes over a long period can result in a very interesting future.

Improving Documentation

Posted by Pete McBreen 11 Nov 2009 at 07:48

Seen a few useful blogs on documentation recently.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has a good look at how the Django culture does documentation.

I especially liked this

Auto-generated documentation is almost worthless. At best it’s a slightly improved version of simply browsing through the source, but most of the time it’s easier just to read the source than to navigate the bullshit that these autodoc tools produce.

My take is that it is possible to produce readable and useful documentation using Rdoc or Javadoc, it is just that most projects do no take the time to produce good documentation. In many cases of Rdoc generated documentation all that is there is the signature to the method and a link to that excerpt of the code… not very useful.