Posts Tagged ‘software engineering’

Some of the problems I see in Agile Methods – Part 1

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

First of all, I admit I do not consider myself an expert in Agile Methods. Yes… I’m a Certified Scrum Master and I’ve been involved in several agile projects. But let’s say I don’t know enough and have enough experience to consider myself an expert. Even with this, I will dare say which are the issues that I don’t see addressed correctly in these methods, or at least in the typical “Scrum + XP” combination that used in most cases in Industry. The risk here is that someone will quickly reply with a link to explain how these issues can be solved. Oh well… I’ll take that risk.

I also want to say in advance that in general I have a positive view on Agile methods. I think they are an interesting packaging of useful practices and that they have made a huge contribution to development practice in general. I also value some new practices like TDD and Continuous Integration that have provided smart answers to increasing challenges of software development.

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A change in focus for Software Engineering

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

soft My friend Hernán Wilkinson sent me a link to a blog post that included a reference to a very interesting article by Tom DeMarco. Just as a reference, De Marco is one of the classic authors in Software Engineering. When I studied systems analysis more than 20 years ago, his book on Structured Design was like a Bible.

I agree with almost everything he says there, but still I think that he takes it too hard against his own work, and I want to relate this to my previous post, because what he proposed in “Controlling Software Projects” is something that even in 1982 didn’t work in all software development projects, although from what he says it looks like he didn’t realize that at that time. But the key is that they worked in many software projects: in the types of projects that DeMarco was involved in then. So, probably his mistake was not to mention in what types of software development projects the techniques he was proposing had proved to be effective or were important in relation to what they were trying to achieve. Also, it’s easy to say now that some things proposed 27 years ago are not true anymore. Just as an example, “The Mythical Man Month“, Brook’s classic essays book that is a must for any software professional, has many things that are plain wrong if tried to applied nowadays, as Brooks himself recognized when he said “Parnas was right, I was wrong”.

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Why do we keep searching for unifying theories for software development?

Monday, June 29th, 2009

I want to come back to the discussion about Agile vs. CMMI. After a presentation about the subject in UTN (National Technological University) in Córdoba a couple of weeks ago, I started thinking a bit differently on the subject. I thought that instead of asking the question “Are CMMI and Agile Methods compatible” the important question is “Should CMMI and Agile Methods be compatible?”

In other words, if they are not compatible, so what? Isn’t software development an incredibly wide field so as to need different approaches to different problems? Didn’t for example Management benefit during its evolution from new theories that presented different points of view about how organizations should be managed? CMMI and Agile methods present many incompatibilities (at the CMMI practice level and not at the goal level), and one of the reasons is that they follow different management theories.

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Posted in Methodology | 1 Comment »