Every once in a while, it is healthy to compare how you are getting things done with how others are accomplishing some of the same things. I'm not talking about architecture or design, as these topics are quite transcendental and address how design goals such as availability, scalability, reliability etc, get implemented within a vacuum of sorts.
Instead, this topic is sometimes referred to as theory and practice around “methodology” or “process” and can be a highly contested debate.
In general, methodologies fall somewhere on what I call the “process discipline continuum“:
Adaptive<-------------------------------------------------------> Predictive
This continuum isn’t a new idea, and today, agile refers to each extreme as “Traditional” on the right, and “Evolutionary” on the left, where agile leans, no, pushes the envelope way, way left of center.
Let me get this off my chest: I have grown to hate the word “agile”. It is not because I dislike agile, adaptive, or evolutionary process, but because like all buzz words, it has been misused and abused by too many people that are flat out clueless. Ok, I said it, let’s move on.
In my experience as a developer and architect, my goal has been to strike a balance somewhere in between each extreme, both in the systems for which I have done the high level design and guided the implementation as well as for general process or methodology in general:
Evolutionary ß---------------------------X------------------------à Traditional
Now, if predictive approaches are considered “traditional” by agelists (defines followers of agile), then that might be one indicator as to how radical and revolutionary some agile concepts might be. I say might be, because I am not sure just how radical this stuff is compared to what I am already doing, but the fire of interest has been ignited, so here I am at the Agile 2006 conference in Minneapolis, MN.
This will be an exploratory week and I will do my best to share my thoughts, rants and musings along the way, if nothing else to articulate and distill the content for my own benefit.
Stay tuned…
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