Blogarithms

Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.

An Interview with Kent Beck Here's a good interview with the father of eXtreme Programming (XP) by Scott Plamondon on the IBM developerWorks site. Kent describes how he developed the initial concepts behind XP, when he got involved in a disastrous payroll project for Chrysler. "So, I said that at the end of the first three weeks we'll print a live, cashable check. They said that's impossible -- we must import data from 18,000 systems. I asked if there was one person whose check we could print. 'Well, for most people it's not that difficult.' After three weeks, we printed a live check with correct data. They framed it and put it on the wall. That's the XP creation myth." Whether you listen to Beck (XP) or Steve McConnell (in The Software Project Survival Guide), the concept is one I've learned over and over again in my own 27 years in IT management: Don't use a big-bang process of monolithic phases of requirements, design, implementation, test, etc. It virtually always fails. Instead, you've got to use similar but much smaller phases, and execute them over and over again. Call it "iterated" or "staged" development, the concept is the same. Start with the simplest case and run it all the way through your process--all the way to production-code execution. Otherwise you won't get a chance to exercise your late-phase processes until it's too late. You'll never know if they'll succeed. (They won't and you won't have time to fix them.) Perhaps my favorite example is when I took over the development management of the Starbucks.com web site in 1998. It was a four-month project, which I was asked to join just two weeks before the scheduled launch. (Yeah, they were in deep trouble.) The team had never run a single byte of code on the llive servers, and they'd never tried to port the code from the devlopment environment to production. They should have been pushing new "releases" on a daily basis. Needless to say, the code wouldn't port, and to correct the problem required some fundamental re-engineering. Buy me a glass of wine some time, and I'll tell the rest of the story. It's a good one. Posted Sunday, December 28, 2003 2:19:13 AM

Spolsky on Raymond In a no-holds-barred essay entitled "Biculturalism" Joel Spolsky explores the cultural differences between the Unix and Windows cultures by way of a review of Eric Raymonds latest book, The Art of UNIX Programming. Joel: 'Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers...When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users.' Joel: 'The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, "advocacy," and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical ("yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here") stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop. This haughtiness-from-a-position-of-weakness is the biggest flaw of The Art of UNIX Programming, but it's not really a big flaw: on the whole, the book is so full of incredibly interesting insight into so many aspects of programming that I'm willing to hold my nose during the rare smelly ideological rants because there's so much to learn about universal ideals from the rest of the book.' Despite Joel's harsh rant on what he refers to as Eric's rant, I recommend both Joel's essay and Eric's new book. I guarantee you won't be bored by either. Posted Sunday, December 28, 2003 1:44:47 AM

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